Summary
A joyful throwback of a summer movie sees filmmaker Kazuya Konaka revisiting his earliest efforts.
At some point in our collective movie watching pasts, there was something that made us fall in love with the magic we call cinema. Steven Spielberg just recently made a whole semi-autobiographical film about it in The Fabelmans. Yet for many of us, it was people like Spielberg himself that sparked the wonder in our minds.
Director Kazuya Konaka was notably inspired by Jaws (1975) to make his fledgling debut Claws in the year he turned 13. Known for directing episodes and cinematic pieces for the Ultraman series, with SINGLE8 he comes full circle in this tale of a group of kids inspired to make their own film after seeing Star Wars during its Japanese debut in 1978.
Hiroshi (Yu Uemura) is obsessed with finding ways of recreating the opening Star Destroyer shot, and sets about making experiments with his titular camera, a popular alternative in Japan to the Kodak Super 8 format. When the summer festival is announced, it gives him a chance to make his movie for real.
While sceptical at first, his classmates – including his ostensible love interest Natsumi (Akari Takaishi) – are soon drawn into his passion for storytelling. As we watch them make their sci-fi romance called Time Reverse, it’s a love letter to both film fandom and intense high school bonds.
Like Soushi Matsumoto’s It’s a Summer Film, Konaka’s SINGLE8 is about kids making a movie, but it’s also about the ephemeral moments of youth that are (almost) impossible to replicate. Yet that’s exactly what Konaka has done here, distilling and bottling decades worth of memories into a singular project. There’s those moments where they all excitedly talk about film movies they love – from kaiju epics to George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa – or find a new way of shooting an effect.
The climax of the film is a complete screening of the labour of their efforts. Rather than taking the tried and true method of editing it together with the smiling and enrapture reactions of the audience, Konaka simply lets it play out on its own merits. Here, we ignore the rough around the edges corniness inherent to DIY filmmaking and just enjoy the experience. It’s simply joyful to watch.
During the closing credits, we also get to see a few clips from Konaka’s early films. These not only show us the authenticity of the recreated product, but how even these proto efforts have informed his later features. Indeed, Hiroshi sums it up in the final scene as he leaves us with the mantra of every creative: “The next film will be better.”
2023 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Kazuya Konaka | WRITERS: Kazuya Konaka | CAST: Yu Uemura, Akari Takaishi, Noa Fukuzawa, Ryuta Kuwayama, Takuji Kawakubo, Ryûki Kitaoka, Yusuke Sato, Narimi Arimori | DISTRIBUTOR: JAPAN CUTS | RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 26 July-6 August 2023 (JAPAN CUTS)
