A Fighting Rabbit (Tatakau Usagi) (Tsuyoshi Gushiken, Japan, 1993): The unanimous choice for first prize at the 1993 Image Forum Festival in Tokyo. PFA director and curator Edith Kramer, one of the jurors, called it "a wonderful example of a very personal and modest film, shot in Super 8mm, with an enormously powerful and lasting impact. The film is structured like a diary or notebook, of home movies, still photographs. At first seemingly unrelated, these fragments weave together gradually, and in the process reveal the loss and death of a loved family member, the filmmaker's brother....It is a film which asks the viewer to participate actively in putting together the pieces of the narrative, whose full meaning comes only with the full duration of the film." (42 mins, Super 8mm) The Hair Opera (Mohatsu Kageki) (Yuri Obitani, Japan, 1992): A brash young filmmaker (Obitani himself) comes across the announcement of an exhibition by woman artist Yosefu Kosuzu. Her art consists of neatly framed and mounted specimens of pubic hair, each labeled with the name of a man and the date on which the artist slept with him. Obitani determines to win a place in her next exhibition and to this end begins a video correspondence with this Yoko Ono-like character. Their video "letters" are largely concerned with one subject: hair. Obitani's obsession with the stuff turns out to be more profound than Kosuzu's. "Not since David Holzman shot his famous Diary has first-person filmmaking been this startling and compulsive. No other film I saw in Tokyo this year was more erotic, disturbing or unexpected than this one....-Tony Rayns. (60 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, Video from Super 8mm)