A miscommunication between Kitagawa and Sakaguchi leads to our protagonist becoming, quite by chance, the person hired to make a tourist video about the city. This is the first of a series of encounters that will draw further the narrative in a deserted Kawaguchi (Tobako, in the film), where Sakaguchi’s metaphorical disorientation is food for meditation.
A city filmed by a camera becomes a space abducted by infinite realities. GARDEN SANDBOX, by Yukinori Kurokawa, is shot from the perspective of Sakaguchi, a woman hired to produce a tourist video of a declining industrial city on the outskirts of Tokyo. The trigger, mediated by the filmmaker’s own weapon, becomes a catalyst for spaces and people in motion that expand in unsuspected ways. In this work of deep cinephilia, the fictional city of Tobako (meaning “ten boxes” in Japanese) reflects the structured script based on fait divers that cross huge casting foundries and other intimate rooms. The unfolding of an unrequited love affair merges with a marriage of unknown people, long walks, and a party that becomes a safe space for these characters. Within a collapsing city that tries to adjust to changing times, cinema becomes an asylum from a world that stubbornly falls apart. (Lucas Camargo de Barros)
