Cut

Shuji is a young filmmaker who openly refuses to see cinema reduced to entertainment. He learns that his elder brother, who had financed his films, has been killed over a debt to the yakuza. The debt now falls to him and he has very little time to pay it. Having no money, he finds one way: he takes beatings for cash. To stay standing under them he remembers the films he loves and names them one by one. The film makes that roll call of cinema history the spine of the account. It builds a plot in which a love of cinema drowns a man in violence, and that irony is the film’s own choice. Hidetoshi Nishijima and Takako Tokiwa appear in Amir Naderi’s hundred and thirty three minute film, a joint French, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and American production, completed in 2011.