Japan in Paris in L.A. centres on Saeki Yuzo, an early twentieth-century Japanese artist who makes a pilgrimage to Paris to seek his artistic fortunes, only to find that ethnic and cultural differences stand in his way. Around this narrative, the Yonemotos construct a multi-layered and self-reflexive work in which strategies of disjunction and contradiction are key. Employing heightened theatricality, experimental narrative strategies and archival footage, the film proposes a complex meditation on issues of modernity, representation, ethnocentrism and identity.
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