THE WRECKAGE OF MEMORY: NOTES ON KENJI ONISHI
By Claudia Siefen
Onishi Kenji was born in 1973 in Mie Prefecture, located on the biggest japanese island of Honsh. He began making films with a second-hand 8mm camera, which he obtained during his high school days. In 1995 he founded the filmmaking group “Cinema Train” in Tokyo, a company that distributes films by young Japanese filmmakers and screens underground and avant-garde work from overseas. Here the filmmakers are invited and also united for the individual expression and a desire for a space to share their ideas. In 2007 Onishi worked as a cinematographer for Oguchi Yoko’s Real Access Discommunication. Onishi has made more than 100 films since 1990, ranging from Super-8 studies of light to full-length features filled with drugs and violence. I will be introducing some of them here, brought together on his DVD collection “Selected Works Of Kenji Onishi“.