Dream Girls | A film by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams | UK | 1993 | 50 minutes
This fascinating documentary opens a door into the spectacular world of the Takarazuka Revue, a highly successful musical theater company in Japan. Each year, thousands of girls apply to enter the male-run Takarazuka Music School. The few who are accepted endure years of a highly disciplined and reclusive existence before they can join the Revue, choosing male or female roles. Dream Girls offers a compelling insight into gender and sexual identity and the contradictions experienced by Japanese women today. (Women Make Movies)
Shinjuku Boys | A film by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams | UK | 1995 | 53 minutes
Winner of the Outstanding Documentary award at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Shinjuku Boys introduces three onnabes who work as hosts at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo. Onnabes are women who live as men and have girlfriends, although they don't usually identify as lesbians. As the film follows them at home and on the job, all three talk frankly to the camera about their gender-bending lives, revealing their views about women, sex, transvestitism and lesbianism. Alternating with these illuminating interviews are fabulous sequences shot inside the Club, patronized almost exclusively by heterosexual women who have become disappointed with real men. This is a remarkable documentary about the complexity of female sexuality in Japan today. (Women Make Movies)
Also showing as part of the Kim Longinotto: Vixen Films Retrospective: Pride of Place + Theatre Girls, Divorce Iranian Style, Sisters in Law, Pink Saris, Dreamcatcher
dir. KIM LONGINOTTO & JANO WILLIAMS
year. 1993 + 1995
country. UK
run-time. 103min (50 + 53 min)
£6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Doors 4.30PM
Film 5PM
“Arresting ”
“Refreshingly free of occidental gender sermonizing... The film builds a spectrum of a genuinely alternative sex”
“Bittersweet... wonderfully moving”