Reminiscing the floating world: about EDOnism and a giant catfish

Edonism is the tragic story of James Hallway, an English businessman from the UK who comes to Tokyo looking to fulfill his dreams and lead a peaceful life with his beautiful wife, Sophie. Instead he finds toil, torment and alcoholism. Unable to bear his descent into self-destruction, Sophie leaves, abandoning him to his downward spiral into the gutter. Day by day, his reality is consumed by hallucinations and weird perceptions. Once things can’t get any worse, he falls into a coma.

When he awakens from the coma, he begins to learn some terrifying truths about his condition and his connection to a long-forgotten legend from ancient Japan. Together with the resourceful Dr Geena Landlord he attempts a desperate quest of discovery that leads them both to the very heart of a conspiracy involving a secret government order and the enigmatic being known as the The Cat Fish. 

The sci-fi mystery movie "EDOnism" filmed in Tokyo, directed, written, edited by Alessandro Fantini and produced by Lorenzo Fantini in 2010, had its Italian premiere at the first edition of "La Selva Nera" international film festival in Selvazzano Dentro, Padua, founded and directed by film critic Massimo Bezzati and filmmaker-writer Stefano Bovi.

 When I faced for the first time the idea to shoot a movie in Tokyo, while I was discussing the hypothesis with then soon-to-be EDonism producer Lorenzo Fantini during his latest stay in Italy in 2009, I immediately thought that the script should have deal with something gigantic, frightening and epic. No other city in the world is able to suggest the feeling of a majestic and intimidating human beehive as much as Tokyo. It seemed that all my obsessions for movies like Blade Runner, Akira and Ghost in the Shell as well as my interest in Shintoism, Ukiyo-e art,  and Suehiro Maruo, would have take me sooner or later  to nowhere but to the enigmatic land of geisha, samurai, Godzilla and hi-tech marvels.  As usual, the way I fleshed out the concept and the story was closer to the process of conceiving a painting or a comic than to a traditional pre-production of a movie.
EDOnism FB page: https://www.facebook.com/edonismmovie/

Director, editor, animator, screenwriter, co-producer and soundtrack composer: AFan Alessandro Fantini
Producer, art director, co-writer, casting director and location manager: Lorenzo Fantini
Line producer: Miles Elliott
Assistant producer: Lucy King
Post production supervisor: Nate Jensen
Make up artist: Kana Yoshida
Cast: Sacha Mühlebach, Helene Salvini Fujita, Hiro Super, Lucy King, Lorenzo Fantini, Kyle H., Nate Jensen, Tony Evans, Alessandro Fantini, Cyrus Malekani.

Genre: Sci-fi thriller, drama, adventure
Shooting format: HDV
Runtime: 65 min.
Country: Italy, Japan
Language: English
Filming locations: Tokyo
Release date: June 2010

MUSING ABOUT MOVIEMAKING

The making of EDOnism can be defined as a kind of gestation, considering that about 9 months have passed between the first outline and the end of the post-production period. During this arc of time a lot of ideas, coincidences, revelations and unforeseen events contributed to the uniqueness of the movie. It has been a grand scale effort propelled by the target of finalizing a project that at the beginning could sound utopist, if compared to the very limited range of technical and financial resources at our disposal. Although the thematic root of the story derived from the seismic emergency that unfortunately characterized the 2009 here in Abruzzo (that’s still a dramatic issue on these days), the earthquake phenomenon doesn’t represent an excuse to give to the movie a more humanitarian or social appeal, as some documentaries and movies have done after the disaster. Indeed, what interested me most was to give a poetic representation to the link between the inner realm of human soul and the enigmatic exterior world, a theme that has been often at the core of my previous movies (as well as paintings and novels). Somehow the earthquake becomes the symbolic projection of a human interior cataclysm, an extraordinary event subverting the concept of reality, slowly getting wider proportions and involving the entire community of a city. Tokyo provided a colossal set to the movie, an emotive environment that neither digital effects nor scenography will ever be able to reproduce with the same visual power, offering the perfect physical backdrop to the metaphysical journey of the protagonist. Indeed its breathtaking amount of details properly evoked the hyper realistic visionary ambiance that I imagined while I was writing the script.
I’d like to dedicate Edonism not only to all the victims of earthquakes, but also to the people still trying to restore their humanity among the ruins of their soul.

http://www.edonism-movie.com