SUGAR GLASS BOTTLE / Short Fiction / 2022

In the peripheries of near-future Tokyo, high schoolers Kou and Yuta practice a prank that begins as a faux argument and ends with one bashing the other over the head with a prop glass bottle stolen from their theater department. Yuta coaches Kou to better express his anger to make the prank more convincing until they run into the elderly Deko-chan, a displaced neighborhood friend of Kou’s. The three have a raucous evening smashing bottles that’s cut short when the group is photographed by a police robot dog investigating Deko-chan’s makeshift house.

Energized by the new friendship, but disturbed by an increasingly surveilled and commercialized landscape that is hostile to the unhoused, Kou and Yuta head back to Kou’s mother’s Korean diner for dinner, only to find a real estate shark trying to intimidate Kou’s mother into selling her establishment. As the tensions rise in the eatery, Kou and Yuta seize the opportunity to execute their prank. Finally pushed to the edge, Kou lets loose in a way that blurs the line between performance and actual fury, scaring away the real estate developer.

Initially inspired by a prank that the writer-director Neo Sora (The Chicken, 2020) had pulled on him in his childhood, a sense of warm nostalgia and cold, material reality intermingle to tell a tale set in the not-so-distant future about disappearing spaces and the forces of policing and gentrification that drills this process forward.

starring YUTA KOGA, FUMIYA KIMURA, MAKIKO WATANABE, SHIYUN NAKAMURA

writer-director NEO SORA

executive produced by KOJI YAHAGI

produced by REIKO MORA, DAISUKE UMEYAMA, AIKO MASUBUCHI, ALBERT THOLEN

director of photography OSAME MARUIKE (JSC)

edited by ALBERT THOLEN

production design CHINA HIYASHI

costume design MEI KOMIYA, CHINATSU OBA

sound Takuya Kawakami

FEATURING

"Last Paradise" by Haruomi Hosono

music by DOWNSTAIRS J