Director: Junko Wada

Cast: Sayuri Oyamada, Makoto Ogi, Yoji Tanaka, Yuichi Kishino, Kenichi Okubo, Makoto Tezuka

Country: Japan
Year: 2000
Running Time: 96 min
Format: Beta SP

I first discovered Junko Wada's work with her 1996 Super-8 film, Peach Baby Oil, a truly poetic meditation on the body and the self. This work won awards in Japan and I included it in a traveling show in Europe in 1998, HOME SCREEN HOME.

In Body Drop Asphalt Ms. Wada continues her concern with how best to express "the body in visual image." The film begins as a musical of sorts, with a choreography of beautifully colored legs and shoes that lead us to the main character. In a form that comes out of her earlier work, the voice-over is an internal contemplation, with repeated phrases and a barrage of effected imagery. Then come credits as if the film is over. But it has only just begun!

What impresses me most about this video is how Ms. Wada enters in to the feature length format but never without regarding her materials. There are too many "films" that are made on video today which attempt to hide behind the fact that its medium is video, quite different from film. Body Drop Asphalt is a video feature, and Ms. Wada takes us on a "narrative" journey infused with great magic and imagination.

--Michael Shamberg

Presented By: Michael Shamberg

Michael Shamberg is a filmmaker whose feature Souvenir played at the first Maryland Film Festival. Souvenir premiered in Edinburgh and has played festivals around the world. He curated the show HOME SCREEN HOME for the Witte de With in Rotterdam in 1998, and the show has since toured to Barcelona, Madrid and Paris. He is presently working on a new film to be shot this year. Entitled Benjamin's Briefcase, the film is a "regard" on war. Shamberg studied sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and is presently on the faculty at Bennington College. He is a visiting artist at LiEcole des Arts Superieure in Geneva and the European Film School in Denmark. Shamberg was also a member of the film jury at the Fantastporto International Film Fesitval in Porto this year.