By Mónica Delgado
This 25-minute short film by Norwegian filmmaker Ane Hjort Guttu and Daisuke Kosugi tells the story (in a comical tone) of a young art director of a women magazine in Tokyo, that lives only for work, and whose stress causes the breakdown of sleep and eve.
In a certain oneiric passage, one of the characters that appears like a memory says: “I’m not in the city, the city is in me”, a phrase that sums up the experience of the protagonist, Noaki Hayakawa (played by the screenwriter and producer Daisuke Kosugi), since there’s an intention of showing this life in a first world country as part of a broken subjectivity.
Screened in the New:Vision Award section of the CPH:DOX Film Festival, The lost dreams of Naoki Hayakawa is interesting when the filmmakers see as a rarity this labor alienation, rescuing the poetic in the life of a character that lives for his work, single, alone, with broken dreams, but who fantasizes about bubbles in the elevators or a flag made of hair that flames near the sea. This “workaholic” founds peace and repose for his fourteen hours of work day in this magic world, which at the end of the day will be taken as an advantage so he can still produce and give better ideas to the workplace, a situation that is abused by his bosses and coworkers. The work alienation has reached the limits of the intimate and the self.
Taking advantage of the hybrid creature that is nonfiction; exposing the protagonist while giving an interview in cameras or showing his liberty so he becomes visible, The lost dreams of Naoki Hayawaka plays like an exercise on Japanese psyche facing the executive world of labor, an exercise approached with irony and humor, which avoids seeing as cruel this permanent state of delivery for a payment and acknowledgment.
Series: New:Vision Award
Director/producer: Ane Hjort Guttu
Screenwriters: Ane Hjort Guttu / Daisuke Kosugi Productor / Consultor: Daisuke Kosugi
Executive producers: Elisabeth Kleppe / Aldeles AS
Cast: Daisuke Kosugi
Cinematography: Marte Vold FNF
Editing: Jon Endre Mørk
Sound: Øyvind Rydland
Composer: Mari Kvien Brunvoll
Norway, 2016