Punk Classics from Masashi Yamamoto: ROBINSON’S GARDEN and WHAT’S UP CONNECTION

The American Cinematheque is proud to present the new 2K restorations of punk auteur Masashi Yamamoto’s ROBINSON’S GARDEN and WHAT’S UP CONNECTION, courtesy of Kani Releasing.

ROBINSON’S GARDEN, 1987, Kani Releasing, 119 Minutes, Japan, Dir: Masashi Yamamoto.

On a drunken walk home, bohemian drug-dealer Kumi (Kumiko Ota) discovers an abandoned building on the outskirts of Tokyo. Attracted by the vast untapped space rampant with luxuriant vegetation, she promptly sells all of her belongings and retreats from the world. She carves an island for herself out of the sprawling concrete squat, now free to grow cabbage and express herself in any way she pleases. This film offers a stark contrast to the sights of financial prosperity brought forth by the films of the Economic Bubble era. Lensed by Tom DiCillo (Living in Oblivion, Johnny Suede), it instead shares much in common with the No Wave films the cinematographer pioneered alongside Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise). An unsung, anticapitalist masterwork.

FORMAT: DCP

WHAT’S UP CONNECTION, 1990, Kani Releasing, 121 Minutes, Japan/Hong Kong, Dir: Masashi Yamamoto.

When Hong Kong teenager Chi Gau Shin (Tse Wai Kit, School on Fire) wins a trip to Japan, he unleashes a chain of events that will soon bring him from the secluded fishing village of Po Toi O to Tokyo, by way of Kamagasaki – the so-called slums of Osaka. Upon returning home with a merry band of schemers, Gau Shin finds his family of resourceful counterfeiters on the verge of expropriation. A multinational conglomerate led by a ruthless Japanese developer has found the village, and is determined to raze it to build the new center of world trade! A rare bilingual Japan-Hong Kong co-production that unfolds as part unhinged globalization mini-epic, fringe documentary and breathless, kaleidoscopic evocation of a specific pan-Asian cultural experience as the 1990s drew near. Bursting at the seams with possibility, it brings Yamamoto’s project – of capturing beauty and resilience in the margins of capital – to its maximalist apex.

FORMAT: DCP