Kyoto Elegy

Kyoto Elegy (2014)

マンガ肉と僕

Kyoto in April. A timid and shy student, Watabe, is struggling to make friends and spending lonely days in a university. Concurrently, student life for Satomi Kumahori has also been hard, due to her overweight appearance. For Satomi, it is only Watabe who talks to her kindly and does not make fun of her. One day she takes advantage of Watabe and starts to live off him, literally like a parasite. While Satomi is using him as a slave, he falls in love with Nako, a girl he meets at work. At the same time, he accidentally learns about Satomi's past.

Date of release
2014-10-26
TMDB
0.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Kiki Sugino

Casting

Interesting facts

Kyoto Elegy is a 2014 Japanese black comedy-drama film directed by Kiki Sugino, starring Takahiro Miura, Sugino, Eri Tokunaga and Chisun. Sugino's directorial debut, it is an adaptation of the Shiki Asaka novel Manga Meat and Me and follows a university student and his relationships with three women.

Production

In September 2013, it was announced that actress and producer Kiki Sugino, who was then reputed as a "muse of Asian independent cinema", was to make her directorial debut with Kyoto Elegy, an adaptation of the R-18 Literary Award by Women for Women-Shiki Asaka's winning novel Manga Meat and Me, which also served as the film's title in Japanese.

The screenplay was written by Kotaro Wajima. Set in Kyoto, it was to follow Watabe, a 'loser', over a period of 8 years. It begins with him studying law in university shortly after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Struggling to fit in, he meets Satomi, a fellow student who is overweight, is ridiculed by her peers as a result and soon turns to leeching off of him. He then meets Nako through his part-time job and falls in love with her.

Principal photography took place in Kyoto over 11 days in September 2013. As a director, Sugino sought to "capture images of women from the past, present, and future, along with the beautiful scenery of Kyoto." For her role as Satomi, she would have spend nearly three hours daily applying special effects makeup for about four days straight, which was made "quite challenging" by the city's warm climate at the time.

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

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