In conversation with documentary film-maker Phil Cox
Screening and Q&A
Screening of Phil Cox's "Love Hotel" 6pm on Monday Nov 10th with the director Phil Cox in Roscoe Theatre B (please note change of venue).
The Love Hotel: Pensioners, lawyers, married couples and teenagers are all regular clients at the unique Angelo Love Hotel in Osaka Japan. With unprecedented access throughout the hotel, this film reveals their desires, fantasies and secrets as they inhabit one of the most private and anonymous spaces in Japanese society. 2.8 million people a day visit Love Hotels in Japan. The Angelo Hotel is not a brothel, but in a structured and conformist society, it is only here where, with wife, mistress, group, partner or alone, people of all ages may unlock their desires and without judgment – ‘love’ and ‘be’ how they wish. Through the intimate lives of the clients, and the struggle of the Angelo's charismatic manager fighting for his hotel's survival, this is modern Japan seen through the prism of sex, love and escapism.
"Love Hotel ultimately delivers a sophisticated and beautiful exploration of sex and romance in the 21st century - this is the first ever film shot inside one of Japan's 37000 Love Hotels - painstakingly gathered over three years…" HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
"A fascinating reflection from a hidden Japan, between Eros and Love, with extraordinary characters and stories… nights in Love Hotel are like dreams….” DARKSIDE CINEMA
"Lifting the veil of moral and sexual conformism through the power of film…with echoes of works by Pasolini..." IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO
Love Hotel, dirs. Phil Cox & Hikaru Toda, England / France / Austria 2014, 90 min
Organised by Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology and Centre for Screen Studies.