Cutie and the Boxer

Director: Zachary Heinzerling

2013 / 83min / DCP

Ushio and Noriko Shinohara have been married for 40 years, first meeting when 19-year-old Noriko arrived in New York City from Japan to study art and fell under the spell of Ushio, a Tokyo expat who’d been in the city since 1969, trying in vain to make waves with his unique and (literally) pugilistic approach to painting. After four tumultuous decades, the hard-drinking Ushio continues to toil in obscurity while Noriko, resuming her own artistic practice, has begun to emerge from her husband’s shadow—a process that, as documented by Heinzerling and accompanied by Yasuaki Shimizu’s ornery avant-garde sax soundtrack, becomes a meditation on self-sacrifice, codependency, and the compulsion to create.

Post-screening discussion with composer Yasuaki Shimizu and writer Yumiko Sakuma on Saturday, March 22nd.