Pink Film Veteran Zeze Takahisa Champions Original Stories at Tokyo Masterclass
At the Tokyo International Film Festival, Zeze Takahisa reflected on his pink‑film roots and his insistence on original storytelling.
Masterclass at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya
The Tokyo International Film Festival’s Tokyo Talk program hosted a masterclass with Zeze Takahisa, director of the opening film “Sukiyaki,” before a full‑house audience at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya.
From Pink Film Assistant to Award‑Winning Director
Born in 1960 in Oita Prefecture, Zeze entered a pink‑film production company in 1986 as an assistant director. He debuted as a director in 1989 with Extracurricular Activity: Rape, earning the Pink Grand Prix Award for Best New Director.
Alongside Sano Kazuhiro, Sato Toshiki and Sato Hisayasu, he was dubbed one of the “Four Heavenly Kings of Pink.” The nickname, he recalled, originated from a theater in Toyama or Ishikawa and was meant to leverage the “Nouvelle Vague” cachet.
Constraints and Creative Shifts
Pink films were shown in specialized theaters for an exclusively male audience, with a requirement to insert a bed scene roughly every ten minutes. Zeze said, “I’ve always been pretty firm in my convictions,” and noted that from the early 1990s the culture shifted, granting him more freedom to say what he wanted.
He expressed a particular interest in female criminals, finding “the motives behind the crimes…different from the male perspective.” His early script for Extracurricular Activity: Rape featured delinquent high‑school girls at Haneda Airport battling the yakuza, and he gave it the private title “Go to Haneda and You Will See Kids Dressed Like Pirates Ready to Attack.”
Exploring Mysticism in the Mid‑1990s
When asked about the 1994 pink film Genuine Lesbians: Embarrassing Positions—Zeze’s own title “Fallen Angels in September”—he linked it to a contemporary “mysticism thing” among young people, noting a trend of “searching for past lives” and a desire for “connections to this different world.”
International Reception and Collaboration
The “Four Heavenly Kings” films were later screened in retrospectives at the Rotterdam festival and elsewhere abroad. Zeze observed that “the overseas reception came first, and then it was sort of re‑imported” back to Japan.
He also emphasized that pink‑film directors were not confined to a “porn ghetto,” collaborating with peers such as Aoyama Shinji and Suzuki Takuji, whose diverse backgrounds fostered “interesting” projects.
Transition to Mainstream and Ambitious Projects
In 1997 Zeze made his mainstream debut with the teen horror Kokkuri‑san, while continuing to alternate between pink and mainstream work for the next decade.
His most ambitious film to date, Heaven’s Story (2010), runs 278 minutes, screened in the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival, and won the FIPRESCI Prize. He described it as different from a so‑called ‘ordinary movie’ and said a personal sense of urgency drove him to undertake the project.
Originality Over Adaptation
Addressing industry talk about the difficulty of creating non‑adapted films, Zeze asserted that the movies he finds interesting and entertaining are all originals, underscoring his lifelong commitment to new stories.
Original ideas remain his north star, whether in pink cinema or marathon‑length revenge dramas.
