On Sunday, March 27^th 2016, 3^rd moonbow cinema event was held featuring Restless (*1) . The story is about teenagers who closely live with death, starring Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska. The screening location selected for this film was a theater CAPSULE(*2) on the edge of Harajuku. The area gave me pictures of two teenagers strolling around. As getting closer to the theater from Harajuku, the noise of town became less and less to be away from reality and to enter the story. Since it was a cherry blossom season, it was important that there were cherry blossom trees on the way to the theater and

Restless is written by Jason Lew who I had a chance to talk with at Sundance Film Festival two month before this event. Since I wanted to introduce Lew to the participants of moonbow cinema, I decided to give introduction before and after the screening for the first time.

Luckily, the story of Restless is set in Portland, Oregon, where I lived before and the director Gas Van Sant lives for a long time. moonbow cinema’s concept is to provide participants the opportunity to go deeper into the story by selecting the screening location where fits to the story of each film. By sharing about Portland before the screening, I was hoping that participants would be ready to enter the story. I showed pictures taken in Portland for the introduction.

The facts shared about Portland includes that the city is surrounded by forest, divided by Willamette River into east and west side. The sunset over the river never makes people bored. Portland is called as Bridge Town because there are many bridges to connect both side of rivers. People enjoy spaces under the bridge as Burnside skate park or impromptu party venue where people come by bicycles. Recently Portland became famous for its original culture here in Japan. The magazine KINFOLK (*3) published in Portland is now available in Japanese as well.

After the screening, I introduced Sundance Film Festival and Jason Lew. In Restless, Lew wrote a ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot from WWII played by Ryo Kase, a Japanese actor. At Sundance, I talked with Lew after the screening of  WE ARE X (*4) , a documentary film about a Japanese rock band, X JAPAN. This documentary mentioned death, especially suicide as well. Lew told that he was interested in the cultural difference between Japan and China, where his family rooted. He said that he read a lot about Japanese view on death.

Another new element of moonbow cinema from this vent was to use Peatix (*5) to receive reservation. Until the previous event, email was a main tool but a platform like Peatix worked well to reach out to people who searched for events. Many new participants were at this screening, perhaps also thanks to the Sundance report (*6) published on the web magazine webDICE run by Uplink.

The next screening event was held in summer. A thrilling documentary film was selected to forget the heat. (To be continued.)