No Man's Land
Takahisa ZEZE - Japanese Film Director
The Japanese film director Zeze Takahisa’s distinguished career has spanned commercial and independent cinema, fiction and documentary, television and motion pictures, art film and genre movies, mainstream film and erotic cinema. Echoing that, his work has also often focused on those in between, on postmodern nomads who wander between competing identities—national, ethnic, or sexual—on the margins of society. We are pleased to bring this important filmmaker to Yale to present two of his films and conduct workshops with students. Heaven’s Story is his magnum opus, a 4½ hour epic that won multiple awards at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival and was voted the best film of 2010 by Japan’s Film Art magazine. This is only its second screening in North America. No Man’s Land is an example of his early training years in pink film (soft erotica), combining crime, sex and fragmented narration amidst the media politics of the first Gulf War.
No Man’s Land
Zeze first earned fame as one of the “Four Devils of Pink”, a cohort of directors using soft erotica to explore sexuality, politics, and cinema. One of his masterworks in the genre, No Man’s Land joins the wild rides of two murderous couples against backdrop of the heavily mediated first Gulf War.