Transgender actor Pîtâ gives an astonishing performance as Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet – where she’s ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda for the attentions of club owner Gonda. One of Japan’s leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto bends and distorts time, and freely mixes documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within-a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, his own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons.
Funeral Parade of Roses is a celebration of youth and subcultures, a condemnation of intolerance, and a one-of-kind cinematic experience.
This key work of queer cinema screens in a new 4K digital restoration and is paired with Looking for Jiro, a performance video by artist Tina Takemoto inspired by the real-life case of a gay Japanese immigrant imprisoned in the US during WWII.
Toshio Matsumoto was a prolific feature, experimental, and documentary filmmaker whose career spanned five decades. His daring and confrontational work has earned him a place amongst the great Japanese New Wave filmmakers and his commitment to avant-garde cinema never wavered. Matsumoto has published many books of photography and was a professor and dean of Arts at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. He was also the President of the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences. He taught at the Kyushu Institute of Art and Design (Kyushu Geijutsu Koka Daigaku) in the early 1980s.
He lived in Tokyo until his death in April 12, 2017.
Tina Takemoto's work explores LGBT perspectives on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and Asian Pacific Islander queer activist history. She has received grants from Fleishhacker Foundation, Art Matters, and San Francisco Arts Commission. Her films have screened nationally and internationally at festivals including Frameline, Outfest, Ann Arbor Film Festival, MIX NYC, CAAMfest, Fusion, MIX Milano, MIX Mexico, Hamburg Queer Film Festival, and Rio Gay Film Festival. Her work received Best Experimental Jury Award at Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival. Takemoto is a Queer Cultural Center board member and co-founder of Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts.
