Voyages, Voyages: Tokio

Usually travel series are cheap and quickly made - cable TV product. ARTE decided to give a 'carte-blanche' to chosen author-directors. They had to choose a city, a country, a place in the world, to go there alone with a DVDCAM, and to bring back their video-diaries, made from their sensations, emotions and hazardous encounters. Tokyo by Jean-Pierre Limosin is one example of this challenge: to use theme, format and schedule of 'basic' TV to make documentary films. Well-known in France, Limosin had notably produced portraits of artists and of writers, as well as feature films. He is very keen on Japan where he made Tokyo Eyes (a feature selected in Cannes 1998) and a portrait of the director Takeshi Kitano [1999]. In this film, he delivers his personal vision of Tokyo: its streets, its pace (definitely 'techno'), its magical daybreaks, his photographic obsessions, his private feelings. As Jean Pierre Limosin says: 'There are so many infinities that our eyes are not enough - we must also look inward.'