Tokyo Magic Hour

In quick succession. Amir Muhammad made two very successful films, both providing a very different portrait of a city. In The Year of Living Vicariously, the most realistic of the two, Muhammad loosely intertwines two documentary genres: that of the ‘making of’ and that of the political reportage. The film was largely shot on the set of the latest epic film by Riri Riza about political machinations in the 1960s in Indonesia. Muhammad collects beautiful material (to which justice is done thanks to the use of two adjacent images), but only appears to show an indirect interest in the film-to-be. The shots are set in the time when Indonesians were first able to elect a president directly, and it is the politics of today’s Indonesia that really gets people talking. The result is a clever, striking and entertaining political documentary. One of the best of its kind. Tokyo Magic Hour is as different from The Year of Living Vicariously as day and night. In this poetic and experimental film, the love story about two men in Tokyo is told through spoken verse and poems. The images – digital and manipulated poems – can vie with the texts. According to the film maker, the experimental film about Japan and the documentary film about Indonesia are both above all very Malaysian. (GjZ)