Word: sais
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Shunpei Kim, the antihero of director Yoichi Sai's new film Blood and Bones, is one of the least endearing characters ever to grace a movie screen. Compulsively cruel, breathtakingly petty, he stalks through life in Osaka's Korean ghetto with his face locked in a snarl. He puts maggoty meat on his family's dinner table while gambling away his earnings, beats and rapes his estranged wife, and hurls his stepdaughter down a staircase. When a worker at his fish-cake factory begs for back pay, Kim responds by applying a hot coal to the man's cheek. After...
...director honors at last year's Venice Film Festival. Shunpei Kim is Kitano's first lead role under another director in more than a decade, and the best performance of an illustrious career. But an equally important force behind what may be this year's best Japanese movie is Sai-a veteran director who, despite a scattering of awards for past films like 1993's All Under the Moon, remains Japanese cinema's best-kept secret...
...Most of the country's successful directors either make highly commercial films for the domestic market or gratify the international-festival crowd with minimalist fare that plays to foreigners' concepts of Japanese aesthetics. Sai, 55, doesn't fit either model-his earthy, empathetic stories of immigrants and outsiders are smart without being arty, and he's carved out a niche for himself by using his work to explore his own ethnic-Korean identity. Though his father emigrated from Korea to Japan 80 years ago, Sai, like most of the country's 700,000 residents with Korean roots...
...Sai started his career as an assistant to Nagisa Oshima, the father of the Japanese New Wave, known for his controversial subject matter (the 1976 classic In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in Japan) and his discipline on the set. Oshima's perfectionism rubbed off on Sai-the cast and crew of Blood and Bones took to calling him "mini-Shunpei" for his dictatorial tendencies. Sai also shares his mentor's taste for the seedier corners of society. "I'll leave the stories about honorable lives and upstanding families to other directors," he says...
Bakshi expects that study abroad programs in India will become even more popular once the SAI Mumbai office opens. “I think people will start coming in droves,” he said. “It’s a wonderful service they’re doing. Having someone there from Harvard is invaluable...