Born in 1967. After a decade honing his craft as an assistant director and directing television dramas, he made his full-length feature debut with My Easygoing Sister (2004). He later released Once Upon a Dream (2007; audio remaster 2016), a unique work that tells its story via voices and visual allusion. Shichiri’s best-known film, it has received annual revival screenings in the fifteen years since its release.
His collaborative documentary with architect Ryoji Suzuki, DUBHOUSE (2012), received international acclaim. Since then, he has collaborated with artists across a variety of genres on everything from experimental films to video performance pieces, including the multi-part Cinema from Sound project (2014–2018) and A Woman Who Cleans Up (2019), a work envisioned for stage.
In recent years, he has taken inspiration from literature, filming a collaborative piece with poet Gozo Yoshimasu as well as the promotional video for the newly opened Haruki Murakami Library at Waseda University. He is currently at work on a feature based on an original script exploring his interest in the end of mankind, eroded by our dependency on digital technology.
In 2017 he served on the jury for the International Competition at Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. His first film, Existence Flicker Symptom (1984), was shot on 8mm while he was still in high school, and was selected by the 8th Pia Film Festival (1985) on the recommendation of director Nagisa Oshima.
