Hold Your Breath Like a Lover (Shin-Dejima Festival)

30 December 2017. At a waste-processing plant, a handful of people pass the night playing video games, navigating troubled relationships and wandering through dim corridors. Their paths cross as a search begins for a dog somewhere inside the facility. Gradually, the presence of the dead enters this ordinary world, and everyday encounters take on an unfamiliar strangeness. Made as his graduation project at Tokyo University of the Arts, this early feature by Kohei Igarashi, director of Super Happy Forever, follows lives unfolding through a long factory night. The boundaries between the living and the dead, intimacy and solitude, grow quietly uncertain. Selected for the Filmmakers of the Present competition at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival.