Blue Fireworks

Reiko, a woman in her forties who edits adult videos, encounters a 19 year-old girl, Ayaka, who, through acting in these videos, seeks a place for herself through a tormented form of self-assertion. To Reiko, this is the cry of an isolated soul cut off from involvement with others. This vivid drama looks at how, in a time when our hopes and dreams are increasingly opaque, communication can be restored and the courage summoned to live life to the fullest. Blue Fireworks was undoubtedly the most talked-about tv drama in Japan in 1999. It swept all the major tv prizes in that country. It is a courageous attempt that opened up conservative public television in Japan to treat the porn industry as a main theme of drama for the first time in its history. Wakaizumi shows a very dark aspect of modern Japan in which lonely people struggle to find a meaning to life. Yet the eyes of the director are in no way cold to them. Wakaizumi says: 'This is my love letter to the girls who work in porn.'