Junk Films / 2007

A controversial still photographer specializing in grim death portraits translates his morbid sensibilities to the moving picture to offer an affecting look at death from an entirely unique perspective. Tsurisaki Kiyotaka specializes in the kind of photography that most folks would shrink away from. Over the course of his career, Kiyotaka has photographed more than 1000 deaths, a focus that often finds him facing legal problems in his home country of Japan. In this collection of short films, the photographer shifts his focus to the subject of war to offer a startling and sobering look at the aftermath of combat. Additional images of starvation, disasters, and tragic accidents highlight the fragility of human life and the grotesqueness of death's many forms.