The Contestant

The Contestant (2023)

The naked truth about the world's first reality star.

The incredible true story of a man who lived for 15 months trapped inside a small room, naked, starving and alone... and completely unaware that his life was being broadcast on national TV in Japan, to over 15 million viewers a week.

Date of release
2023-09-08
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (63)
Runtime
1h 31m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Clair Titley

Casting

Interesting facts

The Contestant is a 2023 British documentary film directed by Clair Titley. It tells the story of Tomoaki Hamatsu, better known as Nasubi, as he starred in the challenge, starting in 1998, of Denpa Shōnen teki Kenshō Seikatsu on the Japanese reality TV show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, and also some of his subsequent life as a famous person.

Development and production

Jennie Kermode interviewed Titley on Eye For Film:

Since the end of his ordeal, which went on for over a year, Nasubi has moved on to do some remarkable things with his life. He’s a man of considerable fortitude, but still, it’s difficult to make a film about something like Denpa Shōnen without a risk of exploiting the subject all over again. When I met with Clair to talk about the film, this concern was the first thing we discussed.

"It was huge concern for me," she says. "I think whenever you make a film, you're always conscious of not wanting to retraumatise your interviewees or contributors, but particularly in this instance, because we're making a film about a TV programme that obviously was very traumatic for Nasubi. And so the way I approached it was that consent was a really important part of this."

Titely originally made contact with Nasubi by writing to him via a translator. Titley told Nasubi "I want to collaborate, I want to make it in this way and I want to make it about your story." At Nasubi’s instigation, he came to the UK, and then the three of them - Nasubi, Titley and the translator - spent time travelling together in the UK.

"We spent a lot of time in the car just talking and unpacking a lot of this story and a lot of the things that he hadn't been asked before, which surprised me, and a lot of things he hadn't unpacked. So that's how the relationship started. It's been a long journey, as all these things are, and I think we're still on it."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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