Mined Zone

CANIBA

• Directors: Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
• FRANCE / 2017 / DCP / Colour / 95´ / Japanese; Turkish, English s.t.

• Director of Photography: Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
• Editing: Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
• Producer: Valentina Novati, Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
• Production Co.: Norte Productions, S.E.L.
• World Sales: Elle Driver

Familiar to the festival audience with their extraordinary documentary Leviathan, which observed a fishing boat, the directing duo Lucien Casting-Taylor and Verena Paravel are pushing boundaries with their new film Caniba, which follows the outcast Issei Sawaga. Sawaga who had killed and consumed his classmate while he was a student at Sorbonne in 1981, was declared legally insane and unfit for trial and sent back to his native Japan. Sawaga, who earned a living by profiting from the sensation that his lurid crime created, is now severely incapacitated by advanced diabetes and a stroke and lives wholly dependent to his brother, yearning to die at the hand of another cannibal. Encouraging the audience to question their own unusual desires, the directing duo had the premiere of their film at Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section.

This film was a Meetings on the Bridge participant.