Today from 17:00-20.00 hrs, the UvA Film Club will continue their weekly screening in HVL/BuzzHouse’s Co-Working Space! This week's film is Pastoral: To Die In The Country (Shūji Terayama, 1974), with an introduction by Gia Tue Trinh.

“Based on Terayama’s autobiographical collection of tanka poetry, Pastoral: To Die in the Country entrenches itself in the framework of a child’s game—“those long games of hide and seek”—as a filmmaker seeks out his own sense of self within the faint sketches of his past, re-imagining the countryside of his adolescence. Fragmented and prismatic, Terayama’s surreal manifestation of childhood is a refracted mémoire of broken time, inhabited by carnival acts, provincial superstitions and a chorus of cloaked women. Shot in Terayama’s native Aomori against the backdrop of the haunted Mount Osore—a gateway to the underworld in Japanese mythology—Pastoral epitomizes Terayama’s unclassifiable brilliance. The film’s angura theatricality and phantasmagorical imagery are rich with symbolism, confronting the wounds of Showa’s imperial legacy, displays of the perverse amid sexual deviance and coupling desires, and the inevitable follies of youth” (Source: Japan Society).