Confluence

Life Is About Losing Everything

A knife suspended in the air, a PVC trench coat, a slick of red lipstick and multiple stories of murder and obsession all become signifying agents in this camp mash-up of language, narrative and performance.

RETRODREAMING examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story: May it be during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling "Kaidan "(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed "Kaidan "(Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for "Scary School Story") in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures. The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo. A voice from a tape recorder recalls the reality of a secret experiment during a pandemic that resulted in further mysterious events. The audiovisual experience draws the viewer into a strange, suspenseful atmosphere somewhere between an unlived retro-future, a sci-fi dream, and an unfinished mystery tale.

When his two mature children Anton and Linda start leaving the house, after graduation, father Michael stops taking care of his body. Anton sacrifices his body for a bed-rest-study to contribute to spacetraveling, while Linda is in search of her first sexual experience.