Hi all!
We wanted to extend a quick note to all of you to thank you for making our launch, and the release of Tadashi Nagayama’s Being Natural, a success. And to wish you a proper Happy New Year. This new one is looking suspiciously like the last, because of you-know-what, but we’re hoping that things are looking up wherever you may be.
Our limited, glow-in-the-dark slipcover edition (a first!) is selling at a good clip, and our second release will be announced very soon. You might have an idea as to what that will be, based on our earlier trade announcement, but we think you’ll nonetheless be surprised by the package we’ve put together for this film, making its Blu-ray debut. Taken together with Being Natural, it will constitute a sort of mission statement as to what we aim to do with Kani, in terms of a corpus looking both forward and back.
We put a lot of thought into the packaging for Being Natural, to the extent of calling it, privately, a “story slip” : packaging composed of discrete jokes (a cloud of what? why does it glow in the dark? what it that purple pit in the ramen?) that only fully makes sense once you see the film. Letterboxd user Andrew got it and we loved reading it.
Being Natural is a movie that is hard to talk about, because it does hinge on going in a blind as possible. At face value — and if you’re still on the fence about taking a chance on it, and on us — let’s just say this is an oddball slacker comedy set in the Japanese countryside, and exactly the kind of eccentric cinema we hope to defend and support. In Being Natural this setting allows for a discrete commentary on a myriad things, chief of which is gentrification and Japan’s ongoing and unresolved nuclear crisis. It sounds heavy, but it truly isn’t — deftly handled as a cosy vibe, cosy that is until it isn’t. Mathieu Li-Goyette, editor-in-chief of the Montréal-based film mag Panorama-cinéma (linked here for those of you who read French) pens the essay for this release and put it best when he states that the film its somewhere, extraordinarily, between the tragicomedy of Yasujiro Ozu and the psychopolitics of a Larry Cohen!
Some of you might recognize the film’s lead, Yohta Kawase, from Shozin Fukui’s abrasive BDSM/cyberpunk cult classic Rubber’s Lover (1986) and Kanji Tsuda from Takashi Shimizu’s perennial J-horror classic Ju-On: The Grudge (2002). And while it might seem, at first, that these things have nothing to do with one another, let’s just say that this stroke of casting will feel quite deliberate by the end — Being Natural being a worthy addition to the catalogue of cinematic curios we all know and love.
We’d love to hear more from you — whether about this release or what you hope to see from us going forward. Drop us a comment below, or at info@kani-releasing.com.
Stay safe!
Ariel (& Pearl)