Memory’s Journey

Dig Through Time: OVA

Short film: Food Chronicles

This is an experiment film project I have done in Sep 2023. In the initial concept, “Food Chronicles” was envisioned as a darkly humorous film about the pursuit of fine food in a totalitarian world. The story follows Li, an office worker, who visits an underground restaurant to eat a bowl of beef noodles. After overcoming several obstacles, Li finally eat the noodles but then arrested by the police due to diarrhea by that noodle.

I wrote this story was 90% due to I am a harsh diner, maybe I am still not enough to call myself as a foodie, but this is one reason why I choose chasing fine food as theme of this film. [1] The trend of using semi-cooked foods in restaurant at China also influenced this story, I fear a potential future where I could go to a restaurant and only be able to get those semi-cooked foods—which is a possibility in China, since it is the most cyberpunk place today.

The first story, focus on pursuit of fine food, was a imitate work to Oshii Mamoru‘s The Red Spectacles(紅い眼鏡[2]), In that film, there is a scene where the protagonist, Kōichi, discovers a secret underground stand-soba restaurant and gets arrested by the police after eating poisoned noodles. I didn’t want my film to merely be a copy of that story, so I shifted the focus to different elements within the narrative, ultimately centering on the theme of revolution.

In the second version, I focused more on the conflict between characters over food. I wanted to shape food as a symbol of revolt, similar to the final vision. The second part was completed rather quickly, and I felt it was fine, so I found a producer and gathered the crew to shoot it.

Then there came a big problem: we were supposed to shoot it in a restaurant, and we had found one that agreed to let us shoot. However, they withdrew their permission a week before the scheduled shoot, which forced us to relocate to an apartment to finish the project. I had to rearrange the shot list, the storyboard, everything, but the most pressing issue was explaining why the story took place in an apartment. The apartment’s living room was connected to the kitchen, and if the living room appeared in frame (it was a well-designed space), how could we evoke the intended sense of hopelessness in our story? I couldn’t find a solution on set, so I had to resolve it through editing.

To make these scenes feel unreal yet meaningful, I chose to edit the film in a mockumentary-like form. I used watched many crime TV shows when I was at China, they all included a part of actors demonstrated how crimes were committed. I wanted my film to echo this style: what we see is presented as part of a historical TV show describing a revolt. This design choice was inspired by another of Oshii’s films, 立喰師列伝, where he uses a surreal story about fictional characters to metaphorically represent real history.

I aimed to achieve a similar effect in my story by creating a narrative about fictitious history, which contradicts the part of live-action scenes. The fictional history suggests that the country’s demise was due to financial problems, not a revolution, and even the story itself could be fictitious—that’s why in the film, you can see everything continue after I say “cut.” I want the audience to realize that what we are watching is a constructed story; under these circumstances, some defects in the scene could be intentionally overlooked [3].

More importantly, the rejection of the live-action narrative does not negate the overall story. I aim to express a spirit of revolt in this film: even though Li’s try might not have left any mark on history, and might even be a fictitious record in a book, the spirit of Li’s defiance, akin to that of Sisyphus, persists somewhere.

How would I rate this film? I would give it a 7 out of 10. It was fine, but it could have been better. The first issue was with the poster, where I featured a cup of noodles as the main element. This choice introduces some ambiguity: is a cup of noodles considered fine food? The opening scene shows a person being arrested for eating a cup of noodles, but if I had included more scenes depicting people eating toothpaste-like food, the audience might have understood the concept more easily. Alternatively, changing the cup of noodles to something like beef noodles could have made this clearer. The Sisyphus spirit, intended as my main theme, also wasn’t clearly portrayed, a consequence of the shift in film style during the editing phase.

[1]: Eat fine food is actually not my first desire, the real first one is take bath everyday, but I guess only Japanese people could understand this.

[2]: 紅い眼鏡 is Oshii’s first live action film, also my most favorite live-action film by him(I believe立喰師列伝 is not live-action film, maybe also not an animation )

[3]: Using this form to fix the issue in my shooting doesn’t mean I did well in production, I suppose to use a fine live-action to pair with my narrative, but I do have prepared this as a B plan when I have trouble.

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