Fufu the Worldweary

Shot on video, Obitani's amazing magnum opus covers a huge amount of ground: car theft, lesbianism, Japanese nationalism and racism, animist cults, Anglo-Irish conflicts, war crimes, scooter crashes and much besides. Obitani himself plays a right-wing leather boy whose only real friend is Hajime, a poet of Korean descent. Their former girlfriends (now a twosome) become disciples of a mysteriously silent guru, who soon adds Hajime to his flock. Fufu, meanwhile, is missing. His elder sister Kayo is scouring Japan for him; her only leads are that he plays the piano and might be waiting on a bridge. Obitani says that the film (which took four years to complete) originated in dreams and acid trips during the hot summer of 1995, and it's true that its experimentalism sometimes verges on the chaotic. But it's also formally rigorous, funny, sexy and politically astute - not to mention conceptually brilliant.