Hotel Aporia

A haunting, cerebral collage that blurs memory and propaganda, demanding close attention as it unfolds like a dreamlike historical essay.

Directed by

Ho Tzu Nyen

Genres

History, Documentary

Overview

Ho Tzu Nyen's Hotel Aporia features a cast of historical figures from Japan's interwar period, including World War Two kamikaze pilots, philosophers of the Kyoto School, filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and animator Ryuichi Yokoyama. They were all caught up in the heady mix of Japan's militant nationalism, anti-modernism, and cultural propaganda. Letters and correspondence between the artist and his Japanese collaborators, the writers Tomoyuki Arai and Yoko Nose, form the narrative basis of the work. Experimenting with the epistemological and affective capacities of animation, Ho superimposes animation images of featureless faces onto found footage clips from Ozu's fiction films and Ryuichi Yokoyama's animation propaganda films. This is a single-screen cinematic presentation of Hotel Aporia. Its original form, first presented at the Aichi Trienanle, is a video installation projecting layers of animation and hybrid-animation images onto multiple screens within a heritage building.

How it feels

Eerie, melancholic, tense and satirical. Slow-burning and demanding.

About

War, politics, identity, memory

Content

Mild violence and language. No gore or sexual content.

Note

Written by AI, so it can be wrong. Full breakdown

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