Focus on Yôko Yamanaka

When her remarkably resourceful no-budget first feature, Amiko, played the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, 20-year-old Yôko Yamanaka became the youngest filmmaker to be invited to the festival in its history, and was established overnight as a distinct—and distinctly strident—new voice in Japanese cinema. The lacerating coming of age drama Amiko and its follow-up, Desert of Namibia, suggest Yamanaka as an inheritor to the ragged, emotionally raw cinema of a John Cassavetes or Maurice Pialat, though coming from a very different cultural, gendered, and generational perspective, both female-centered narratives whose protagonists thrash against the constraints of lowered expectations available to Generation Z Japanese in a stagnant culture offering little hope for the future. Far from the prim propriety stereotypically associated with Japanese femininity, Yamanaka makes films etched in acid.