It is an honour for the Ravenna Nightmare Film Festival to confer the Golden Ring Special Edition of the 22nd edition on Hara Kazuo, the undisputed master of Japanese cinema, to celebrate his artistic genius and ability to create a filmic grammar in which the languages, archetypes and popular icons of a crepuscular, anarchic and, at the same time, popular world intermingle and dialogue.
Hara is one of the greatest living documentary filmmakers in oriental cinema, his rebellious and revolutionary eye is the stylistic signature of his works, it is no coincidence that his style has been defined as "action documentary", marked by creative freedom; reading the plots of reality, the director frees the filmic matter, shaping it into a hybrid of contaminations, between distant imaginaries and forms that merge in an anarchic explosion, creating a single body, a free organism engulfing experiences and narrative drifts.
Since his beginnings, in works such as GOODBYE GP (Sayonara CP), from 1972, Hara Kazuo has always dealt with taboos and incandescent subjects, exposing the nerve centres of society, such as disabilities or degenerative diseases, the theme of A Dedicated Life, always showing reality, albeit harsh and uncomfortable, without taking refuge in false pietisms and shunning hypocrisy.
Hara gives life to a cinema of rupture, showing the dark side of the world, with its ugliness, filth, rot, tearing apart the veil of Maya stretched by the media and social media on the spectator's gaze, accustoming him to an accommodating reality, softened by filters and make-up. Hara goes further, into an uncomfortable but necessary territory to understand what one does not want to know, to closely observe the true essence of things, ugly or beautiful as they may be, but real, without making any compromises.
Schopenhauer's words resonate: "It is necessary to wound and let bleed the deceiving veil, which envelops the eyes of mortals and makes them see a world of which it can be said neither that it exists, nor that it does not exist; because it resembles sleep, it resembles the reflection of the sun on the sand, which the pilgrim from afar mistakes for water, exactly as he claimed".
