Like many of my peers who received Arts degrees in the 1990’s, I spent a year teaching English in Japan. I borrowed a Bolex 16 mm film camera and began documenting what seemed at the time, a brave new world. I also recorded conversations with my students. The resulting film is a poetic, somewhat surreal meditation on the nature of communication. It is also a crumpled love note to a country that has intrigued and mystified Westerners like no other. Heartful English is tied together by a series of loose visual metaphors and recurring themes – most notably the train imagery which permeates the film.
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