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Film/Video JAPANESE NEW WAVE CINEMA FRIDAY, JANUARY 29, 1999, $6 ($4 WALKER MEMBERS) ADMITS TO BOTH SHOWS AUDITORIUM

KITCHEN
DIRECTED BY YOSHIMITSU MORITA
7 PM
The novels and stories of Banana Yoshimoto have become an international phenomenon, inducing what has been called "Bananamania" among hip literati, Generation X-ers, and Japanophiles. Minimalist works dealing with the disaffection, sexual unease, and confusion of (primarily young) Japanese, her stories epitomize the an11ety and anomie that characterize much recent Japanese art. Kitchen, based on Banana's best-selling novel, achieves a kind of Zen zero emptiness that is strangely transfi11ng. An orphaned girl is invited to move into the gadget-filled home of an androgynous young man who lives with his "mother." The latter turns out to be the boy's father, who has lived as a woman since his wife died. The three, along with the mother's new boyfriend, attempt to form a new kind of family. The elegant, hyper-designed Kitchen is about a "search for a place where one can feel better." 1994, Japan, 100 minutes.

MABOROSI (MABOROSHI NO HIKARI)
DIRECTED BY HIROKAZU KORE-EDA
9 PM
One of the most critically acclaimed debut films of the last decade, Maborosi is an intense, poetic film that rewards the intelligence and the spirit. A young Japanese woman, bereft after her husband's death, remarries and moves to a small coastal village, where her hidden grief finds its image in the immensity of the sea. Contained and oblique, the film offers profound insights into the nature of loss, the impossibility of consolation, and the affliction of memory. 1995, Japan, 109 minutes.