Movie Screening & Debate | Phoenix Picture House
Description
Please note: This event is not open to the public
Movie Screening | Phoenix Picture House
Cinema as a catalyst for change. An exclusive private screening event of Japanese drama film Ikiru, the film examines the struggles of a terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat (played by Takashi Shimura) and his final quest for meaning. The screenplay was partly inspired by Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
The major themes of the film include learning how to live, the inefficiency of bureaucracy, and decaying family life in Japan, which have been the subject of analysis by academics and critics. It has won awards for Best Film at the Kinema Junpo and Mainichi Film Awards and was adapted in 2022 into a film called Living, staring Bill Nighy and directed by Oliver Hermanus.
Meet our wonderful Moderator Julia Stolyar:
Dr Julia Stolyar holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London where she teaches modules on Japanese cinema, society and culture. Her research focuses on media industries in Japan and Korea, predominantly television and film, and their broader contexts and functions in their respective societies, as well as transnationally and globally. In particular, she explores the construction of national identities through television and the way the practice of transnational drama remakes affects these representations, negotiating the ‘foreign’ and the ‘national’ into a new story. She has published and given talks on television in East Asia and transnational remakes in the region. Last year she took part and chaired a panel on women in Akira Kurosawa’s film at the BFI.
*Please note that the movie is PG Rated.