A False Weight

2019

4K UHD video, 5.1ch audio

Duration: 49 minutes

September 2019 at Museo Amparo, Puebla

October 2019 at Jeu de Paume, Paris

and CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux 

November 2019, Fotogalleriet, Oslo.

Selected for Artists' Film International 2020 by Tromsø Kunstforening

Synopsys

A Japanese architect, Tadashi has lived his life in accordance with modern, rational, and constructive ideas of control and efficiency, ideas which also found physical expression in his life after retirement as a bodybuilder. This ideology faces dilemma after he has been diagnosed with an unusual and incurable progressive brain disease affecting his movements and speech.

A False Weight is an experimental portrait of a character closely based on the filmmaker’s father (Masanori Kosugi) and partly filmed in his apartment in Tokyo. The film’s apparently simple, almost Ozu-like observation of daily routines is in fact the product of an intensive behind-the-scenes collaboration between Masanori Kosugi and Toru Iwashita, who plays the protagonist. Toru is a Butoh dancer whose movements are inspired by the freedom found in the body’s limitations; Toru and the Masanori worked together throughout the production, on the details of the character’s movements, and how his body feels in scenarios that are portrayed in the work. Through a meticulous choreography of both body and camera, the film slowly unfolds Tadashi’s ongoing struggle for dignity and self-reliance: a story in which maintaining everyday routines and gestures becomes the most intimate form of drama.

Writer/Director/Producer: Daisuke Kosugi

(in dialogue with Masanori Kosugi)

Cast: Toru Iwashita / Tadashi (father), Kayoko Kosugi / Junko (mother) 

Cinematographer: Shinya Aoyama

Sound recording: Ryota Fujiguchi, Yukiko Shimizu 

Lighting: Takahiro Asami

Editor: Katrin Ebersohn

Sound designer: Rune Baggerud

Colorist: Christian Berg-Nielsen

Originally commissioned for Satellite 12 programme The New Sanctuary curated by Laura Herman

at Jeu de Paume, Paris, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and Museo Amparo, Puebla.

Co-commissioned by Fotogalleriet, Oslo.

Supported by Arts Council Norway, Fond for lyd og bilde and Norsk kulturfond; Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond; Fritt Ord; Ingerid, Synnøve og Elias Fegerstens stiftelse for norske bildende kunstnere; Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) 

Reviews:

- Daisuke Kosugi, l’art du détachement by Roxana Azimi, Le Monde

- Daisuke Kosugi: Normative Bodies, Leisure and Other Capitalist Lies by Leon Hösl, PW-Magazine

- Enduring Frames by Heidi Bale Amundsen, Kunstkrittik international edition

- Et av de mest rørende portrettene av alderdom og kroppslig svekkelse jeg har sett by Kjetil Røed, Vårt Land

- ダイスケ・コスギ─日本のサラリーマンがノルウエー人映像作家になるまで by COURRIER JAPON