FILMMAKERS' COMMENTS Dir. Konstantin Bronzit “The God” Dear audience, dear the jury members and the organizers of the festival, dear friends, Sorry I'm not here with you but it's a great pleasure for me to realize that at this moment you can hear my words from other part of the world. For any artist to get any prize is always a big honor. It makes him happy. But there are things in the world that don't let us be happy up to the end. I'm not afraid to be too pathetic, but when you see many people, especially children, suffer because of whims of Nature and what is more worse because of whims of other people, you start understanding that all World Art has a sense (use) only if love opens in our souls. As soon as we stop understanding it our world will stop existing. And all we have to do not let it ever happen is to live in accordance with The Wisdom Nature and with each other. It's so simple and so complicated. Thank you very much! I wish everybody love and prosperity! Dir. Knut Petter Ryan “Hodet mitt (My Head)” Thanks you a thousand times. Thanks a lot for letting me come to this beautiful country. I am very honored to being greeted by the Japanese people. My film is about the human nature and how we express what we feel on the inside with our outside. The simplest way to do that is just to smile. And I have met a lot of friendly smiles here in Japan. Dir Mari Inukai “Blue and Orange” When I started making "Blue and Orange,” I decided to express all of my precious things straight from my heart by means of words and drawings to find my own value of existence. I am very honored that my film premiered at this Short Shorts Film Festival EXPO 2005, in my town and was awarded. I greatly thank the jurors for selecting my film, and I thank my daughter, SENA, from the bottom of my heart who is always next to me and encourages me. I would also like to thank RIE, YUMI and MOM. FILMMAKERS' INTERVIEWS HIROYUKI NAKANO INTERVIEW with HIROYUKI NAKANO Peace and Short Films Hiroyuki Nakano Interview The Short Shorts Film Festival EXPO 2005 website staff sat down for a brief interview with acclaimed Japanese director Hiroyuki Nakano. Never one to dish out the ordinary, Nakano steered our conversation into some heavy philosophy on the nature of design in goods, sustainable energy and of course filmmaking! It was great fun to speak with this engaging and insightful Peacedelic man. The Short Shorts Film Festival EXPO 2005 is extremely pleased and proud to present a special screening of Nakano’s latest short film “RE: CYCLE.” “RE: CYCLE” is the film everyone is talking about and dying to see. Nakano described the film as being more of a “home movie type of film. I did write the script, directed it, shot it myself, produced it…I guess it is very personal. It was very important to make a film that is simple?a six year old can enjoy it and a grandparent can also enjoy this film.” The film follows a vintage glass on a journey spanning decades and exchanging owners again and again. “In many ways, the film is about good design. Today things are designed to be just functional, they are then thrown away, turned into garbage. But better design creates lovely things! You can get into the design of an object, create memories with it and use it for a long time. My friend owns a recycle shop in West Tokyo and everything in the store is old, at least twenty or thirty years old. It all has good design and we appreciate that. He let us use the shop for free.” “This was a cheap movie to make! We were talking about how to put together a budget and I said there was no need to. We just needed to make the movie by ourselves and if we did it our way we could use less money, focus on our original ideas, use the space for free, use the products in the store for free, use a friend as an actor or someone to help with production.” “I started doing a lot of research on glass when I was writing this. Glass is glass. It doesn’t have a soul. But it is made of sand and water and fire and air. It can survive for over two or three thousand years. If glass can survive for over three thousand years, it should have a good design! Design gives feeling. You know, from an object’s beauty, etc. Then there’s the feeling of touch. I’m not sure if this is a good film or not, but it is an answer and ordinary people can enjoy it. “As a Peacedelic man my purpose in life is to make people happy, to give peace. So I am very choosy about the types of projects I work on. You never see really negative things in my work. I don’t use lots of guns and violence. I never do commercials for companies I consider to be bad. “When I do work on a commercial or a music video, I work very, very hard and I get paid well. I can then take that money and give it to Peacedelic and other projects that are real important to me. I can also plant a seed in people, like agents, producers, etc. I’ll be sitting in an editing room with the same person for 24 hours and we’ll work together and talk about ecology, organics, etc. Eventually, they’ll think more about these topics and talk about them with other people. It takes a while, maybe two or three years for that seed to grow?especially with musicians. But you know, they’re surrounded by thousands of people. So the impact can be great. It’s personal communication. It’s better to do it that way, and film is personal. My films can plant a seed much better than giving a speech to an audience.” Nakano went on to discuss a project he recently helped fund and support. The details are a bit hard to follow but it comprised of solar and nano technologies and a way to turn garbage into an extremely efficient form of coal to burn for fuel. “The scientist who is inventing this needs money. It’s just like filmmaking?you cannot apply for a grant until you have the means to show the finished product. So how do you start? I gave him some money, but then I had another idea. I could use his laboratory in one of my film shoots and we can get the production company to pay him for the location!” But what about Nakano’s love for film stock over video? Wasn’t that a contradiction to his earth-friendly stance against chemicals? “I shot ‘RE: CYCLE’ on the new Sony HD cams, but yes I do love film. So I only do two takes for every shot to keep the processing down to a minimum. I’m always given about ten reels of film to shoot a scene and I only use one,” he says with a giant grin. And what is life to Nakano? He grins again, “LIFE IS EVERYDAY!” Knut Petter Ryan Interview with Knut Petter Ryan Winner of International Best Short with his film “Hodett Mit (My Head)” We started our interview with the extremely eloquent Norwegian director by asking him what the inspiration for “Hodett Mit (My Head)” was. “Well, I was going to cut my hair and I thought ‘why not film it?’ But everyone I knew had really strong opinions about it. I hadn’t cut my hair for two years. People were saying I would become a different person you know, conservative and stuff. I started thinking about how much people think about appearance and how you receive a person, how what is on the inside is reflected on the outside through appearance. And so that was it.” “Hodett Mit” is an experimental film detailing about a thousand different hairstyles and looks for one man. “It was shot on one reel of 35mm film, five minutes of stock film for a three minute short. Most was shot frame by frame and some at 150 frames per second. We had to shoot day and night for a week. I had to sleep in the studio and sit in the same chair for almost the whole week. It was about one hundred degrees then too!’ “We had a tiny crew. A makeup and hair person, an assistant, the DP…I was constantly struggling with myself to give direction, especially when we worked backwards. We were cutting my beard at one point and I got a ‘Hitler mustache’ and I was supposed to look surprised. Ah, that was so hard. The producer and I were yelling ‘let’s shoot faster!’ for the whole shoot.” And which was his favorite haircut? “The Mohawk. No doubt about it. I had two hours off that night and it was great! I went out on the street and people were clapping and cheering for me, they’d come right up to talk. It was really fun.” So what is next for the man with a thousand haircuts? “I shot a new short film this summer. It’s also stop motion and me as an actor again. The subject is ‘Midnight Sun.’ For a long time I wanted to do this, but not as a nature short. Then I had the idea to do it as a portrait to show my relationship with the sun. So we follow me around for three days straight as the sun shines 24 hours a day in Norway’s summer.” When he’s not staying up for days or weeks on end and growing multiple hair cuts and beards, Ryan works as a video director. “I’m working on four music videos right now too. When I finish ‘Midnight Sun’ I’m going to move to LA to get lucky! I want to travel the world and make videos and commercials and when I have a great story I will make a feature film. But I don’t want to rush into that. The Norwegian film industry is very small. 50% of the budget is funded by the government, but there are way too many Norwegian filmmakers?over education. Most are unemployed and it is hard to get paid jobs.” But the limitations of living in a tight film community like Norway’s haven’t limited KP Ryan. “My friends and I, we used to do something called ‘shooting night films.’ My editor and I would be working round the clock for days and then when we’d finish we’d just pick up a camera and start shooting and do a whole film in a night. Just make it up! Some have great potential, but non are close to perfect. Another idea I have is to get a group together and make 52 short films…but I can’t get financing for this.” As for Japan, “I love it! I guess it’s just the small differences. It’s my first time in Japan. The people are so polite and I love the food…it’s real nice to come to warm weather too!” LIFE IS STRANGE AND HARD, BUT I LOVE IT.