Love/Juice

Kaze Shindo is the 24-year-old grand-daughter of the great Japanese director Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). The younger Shindo continues the family trend of examining everyday life with an animalistic undercurrent. In Shindo the younger’s case, the animals are goldfish.

Love/Juice is Kaze Shindo’s debut feature and deals with friendship between two girls, one a lesbian, who share a one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo. This is quite a good attempt to look at complex relationships between friends, when one wants more than the other one can give. Shindo successfully, if at times a little too dryly, looks at sexual identity and complex love in a society which values heterosexuality and male dominance above all. The film won the Best New Director Award at Berlin.

Kaze Shindo will attend the festival in Sydney to present her film. Tickets are available from Dendy Opera Quays.