the REBIRTH

10th Anniversary A Monkey Town Productions Film

Written and Directed: Masahiro KOBAYASHI
35mm − vista(1:1.85)- mono − 102min -2007

Man: Masahiro KOBAYASHI

Woman: Makiko WATANABE

Production: Monkey Town Productions

Producer: Naoko KOBAYASHI

Cinematographer: Koichi NISHIKUBO

Assistant director: Junya KAWASE

Editor: Naoki KANEKO

Sound: Daisuke AKIMOTO, Tatsuo YOKOYAMA

Lighting: Norio MINAMIZONO

With his 10th film, director Masahiro Kobayashi takes on his first leading role. Apart from the opening interview scene, the new work is completely unscripted. From a fixed point, the camera continues to capture the monotonous daily routines of the man and woman, and stirs the imagination with images of the tiny changes in their behavior. The finished work makes one feel new possibilities in cinematic expression.

A high-rise apartment block on the sprawling Tokyo Bay shore. For the middle classes, this new residential area on reclaimed land is desirable property. On the other side of the canal, the lower classes live on public housing estates.
Junichi lives in the high-rise apartment and works at a newspaper. His wife died from cancer several years before and now he lives together with his daughter.
One day, the incident happened.
His daughter was stabbed to death in her junior high schoolroom by a classmate.
Having already lost his wife, and then his daughter, Junichi loses all reason to live. He quits the newspaper, withdraws from the world. One year later, he takes a manual labor job in Hokkaido.
Junichi stays at the hostel-like dorm, wakes every day at the crack of dawn, goes to the ironworks, and works. He returns home and goes to sleep along with the setting sun.
Junichi meets a woman Noriko who makes the beds and cooks breakfast.
Noriko was the mother of the girl who killed Junichi's daughter.
Noriko too lives a quiet life as if in hiding in a remote place in Hokkaido. By chance, the victim's father and the assailant’s mother meet. They see each other every day, but never introduce themselves or exchange a word.
Living as though shouldering the burden of original sin, Noriko gradually becomes an irreplaceable presence to Junichi.
One day, Junichi buys two prepaid cell phones at a convenience store and gives one to Noriko. To Junichi, it was a sign of affection. But Noriko lives by stubbornly excluding others and refuses to accept it. 
Junichi feels thoroughly rejected.
The more Noriko rejects Junichi, however, the more she feels something starting to change inside her.
It seems as though Noriko’s frozen heart is gradually starting to thaw.
Then, Noriko buys two prepaid cell phones at a convenience store and gives one to Junichi.
But Junichi dumps the cell phone in a trash can.
Can these two people ever communicate heart to heart?
Will love blossom between them?
“Life without you is impossible. But I don’t have the capacity to live with you.”

The motif of this film -- a girl’s murder by her classmate -- is an incident that actually happened in Japan. Moreover, it's an everyday experience in Japan for the victim’s family, more than the culprit’s family, to be put in the stocks and subjected to trial by fire by the mass media. While writing the screenplay, I wanted to add these elements, and also include the current problem with the gap in Japanese society to make it more suited to the present era.
When I wrote the screenplay, the words "original sin" came to mind and I noticed this was the same theme as my previous film "Bashing".
The movie is limited to the factory and the dormitory, and it made me recall Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" which I'd read long before (in the film, the book is the protagonist’s favorite). I realized this incident should take place in a prison or dorm!
If the camera stubbornly observed them, I believed something would happen. To heighten the tension between the two people, I excluded any dialog from all the scenes except for the interviews.
A murder victim's father and a murderer's mother meet by chance in the confined space of a dorm, and set out on the path to rebirth.
If "Bashing" is a story of "indulgence", then "The Rebirth" must be a story of the rebirth of love that follows.

Director: Masahiro Kobayashi
Born Tokyo, January 6, 1954
After a career as a folk singer and scenario writer, he directed his first feature film “Closing Time” in 1996. He became the first Japanese director to win the Grand Prix at Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 1997. The same year, he established the film production company Monkey Town Productions. His next three films premiered in three successive years at Cannes International Film Festival: “Bootleg Film” (1999) in Un Certain Regard, “Koroshi” (2000) in Director’s Fortnight, and “Man Walking on Snow” (2001) in Un Certain Regard. “Amazing Story (La Coiffeuse)” (2003) won a Special Mention at Locarno Film Festival 2003. After his seventh film “Bashing” was selected to screen in competition at Cannes International Film Festival 2005, the film was highly acclaimed and won the Grand Prize at Tokyo Filmex 2006 and Special Jury Prize at the 25th Tehran Fajr Film Festival.