The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters

Mamoru Oshii
Japan
2006

I still remember well what I was eating each time something happened [...], so by talking about what we’ve been eating, I think we can illuminate the age we’ve lived.

104", 35mm
Color, Japanese with English subtitles

about the film

Oshii’s new film allows you to meet the Fast Food Grifters, eat-and-run tricksters who gorge themselves upon the dishes of the day at Tachigui stand-and-eat stalls; one of the Tachiguishi privileges is to eat in stand-and-eat street restaurants without paying a single yen. The Fast Food Grifters appear in every era, like legends, and take their names from whatever food is the most popular: For example Moongaze Ginji has a taste for the traditional buckwheat soba noodles so he would be situated in the post-War hardship, while the 80’s is the epoch of the voracious Hamburger Tetsu, and so on. Oshii essentially re-documents Japan’s history from the post-war era, through the Korean War, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the formation of the Japanese Red Army and the bubble economy years of the 80’s, using these fictional shadowy phantoms and the dishes that named them as guides. The original title, ‘Tachiguishi retsuden’, can be translated literally as ‘stand-and-eat masters biographies’. Using a process director Oshii, creator of the legendary animation classic Ghost in the Shell (1995), calls “superlivemation” -a mixture of photography, animation and digital puppetry- this film promises to be an experience you haven’t seen anything like before.

about the director

Born in 1951 in Tokyo, Mamoru Oshii graduated from the Tokyo Liberal Arts University in 1976, and has since worked on numerous animation films. His first experience was Ippatsu Kanta-kun as animation director. In 1995, Oshii released Ghost in the Shell, his landmark animated cyber-punk film that became an instant classic in Japan, the USA and Europe. After a five year break from directing and to focus on different projects, he released his long-awaited Innonence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004), followed by Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (2006).

awards

2007 Venice Film Festival
Hong Kong Film Festival
Raindance Film Festival

screenings

February 16 Saturday, 12:30 PM AFM Fitaş Beyoğlu 2

February 22 Friday, 10:30 PM AFM Fitaş Beyoğlu 7

March 02 Sunday, 1:00 PM AFM CEPA Ankara 2

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