Siblings of the Cape – Shinzo Katayama interview

Shinzo Katayama’s Siblings of the Cape screened as part of the Japanese Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne. The film tells the story of siblings Yoshio (Yuya Matsuura) who has a bad leg, and his sister Mariko (Misa Wada) who has an intellectual disability. A visually stunning and highly confronting film Shinzo Katayama’s Siblings of the Cape asks viewers to question what it means to be vulnerable and driven to do the unthinkable. Addy Fong had a chat to him:

Siblings of the Cape deals with very confronting subject matter. Vulnerable people, people who are living in poverty, intellectually disabled people, and physically disabled people. Is this a film that you wanted to make, considering from what I’ve heard it was 10 years to create it? Why did you choose this particular subject matter? 

It actually took me about three years to make this film but I’ve had the idea for a very long time. I have a friend with a disability, a male friend and I thought about what would happen if this friend’s parents were no longer around. I’ve thought about how difficult life would be and how would they sort of adapt to that sort of situation. I considered this when making the film and considered how there are women with disabilities that do engage in prostitution and what that looks like to depict that in a film and address those topics. 

Let’s talk about classification in Japan and how that works. I’ve heard that your film was all self-funded? Is that because of the tough classification in Japan (considering Japan’s quite a conservative society) or because you were personally passionate about this project? 

Due to the subject matter I didn’t think that anyone would be willing to finance it. So I did it myself and I actually expected my film to get an 18 plus rating in Japan but when it came to classification it got it an R 15+ rating. So I was actually surprised that it didn’t get a higher rating.

How has the film been received in Japan and in other countries?

In Europe people tended to take it very seriously and really looked at the story and considered is this happening in Japan are these real things that happen and they really were drawn in by the story. In Taiwan, many of the audience laughed particularly at the scene where the character throws faeces and so these scenes were taken more for their humorous aspects. I think that they were looking more at the humour and the characters interactions with each other. In Japan I saw a bit of both, there were people that took it very seriously and people who laughed. I think that it really depends on the mood of the individual cinema showing the film.

Directing graphic and violent scenes can be confronting especially for actors and Siblings of the Cape contained a lot of these scenes. What was it like working on set? Did you have a closed set with minimal crew? What was filming like?

There were actually not many people, about five or six for the whole film so we didn’t really need to have a specifically closed set. We just filmed normally as there weren’t many people there. The actress who plays Mariko (Misa Wada) is actually a pink film actor in Japan so she’s used to filming these types of scenes so there weren’t a lot of difficulties with that type of content in his film.

Five or six crew members… is that the usual number you work with?

This is a particularly few number of people. I would have liked to be able to have more but due to the limited budget this is what I worked with. There were some scenes I wished we could have had more people but we worked with what we had.

Can you talk about the lanyard with the soft toy Mariko likes to wear throughout the film?

So the doll is actually of a model named Chizuru Chan from a documentary in Japan. In the film Mariko has this disability where she tends to fixate on things so I wanted to show that through her wearing this figure and the fixation on a certain object.

What’s the film called?

The film name is called Chizuru (directed by Akazaki Masakazu, 2011).

Can you talk about how you go about creating vulnerable characters who exist in a world where they’re so restricted it leads them to make morally questionable decisions out of desperation? Can you talk about that process of writing?

For the brother (Yoshio), he’s a character that looks non-handicapped and he looks ‘normal’ but he has this disability with his leg and tends to make poor decisions. I had to look at this character from his perspective as a non-handicapped person and consider the things that he would have to go through and the types of decisions he might need to make. 

As for Mariko, I was informed by the documentary Chizuru and I did some volunteering where I talked to people with disabilities and engaged with them. I got to see the types of things they think and feel and that informed how I depicted these characters in the film and how I developed them.

I had this feeling that even though Mariko has the mental capacity of a child the brother also has a kind of immaturity in making decisions that aren’t the wisest. So in a sense both of them are essentially kids stuck in adult bodies?

I didn’t want to make them seem too smart or too clever because I thought it might be unbelievable for the audience that they would say that doesn’t seem correct for these types of characters. I considered that when I made the film but I don’t think I would necessarily consider the siblings to be childlike I just didn’t want them to seem too sharp. 

The film also touches on those who are carers of people with disability. In your research did you look at that or think about that in the film? 

No, not for this film. I didn’t speak specifically with people that are caregivers. I talked with volunteers who worked with handicapped individuals and there was a center where they would do activities with them like as drawing and in those situations the parents of the individuals were also there so I did get to see the relationship of a parent caregiver with someone with a disability but not specifically people who are in positions were that was their job. 

What is the one thing you really want your audience to take away from this film?

Regarding the situation of the siblings were they live in this situation were they are forced to do illegal activities and forced due to their situation to break the law. I don’t want people to feel bad for them or feel sad or that they’re unfortunate [because of] their situation. I would like people to see the strength of the characters and how they make the best of the situation they’re in. 

What’s next for you?

Next time I would like to do a bit of a broader theme, a broader subject matter, namely something that maybe more people would be able to find accessible or be more appealing to a broader audience but it really depends on how things go when I actually start making the film what type of film it will end up being. I like to depict people, minorities and people who have a lower social standing and I think I will continue to make films that focus on these types of characters.

From my understanding that means basically, if you tend to focus on minorities in film and the depictions of them onscreen, it may limit audiences who want to come to see the film because the viewer doesn’t see themselves in the character or situation. When it’s something that’s violent whether it be sexually or graphically it might not get ticket sales so I find your preference to depict minorities surprising. 

[laughs] I just want to be able to include these types of characters in my films. Maybe they won’t sell that well but that’s just what I’m interested in personally. 

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Interview by Addy Fong.