The World at Full Volume: The Cinema of Shunji Iwai

Making his feature debut in 1995 with the international phenomenon Love Letter—the new restoration of which will be playing Metrograph in a weeklong run—onetime music video director Shunji Iwai’s name would in time come to conjure up an entire, distinctive aesthetic: white-hot overexposed patches, an acute attention to the fall of natural light, an intimate acquaintance with the vicissitudes of growing up and the quietly passionate inner lives of young people, a breathless contemporaneity, and an exhilarating willingness to explore the affective relationship between sound and image, often in close collaboration with composer Takeshi Kobayashi. Marking the 25th anniversary of early-internet cult favorite All About Lily Chou Chou, this series pays tribute to one of our premier pop poets of the dawning digital era, with Iwai himself in-person.