Making Shadows

An insight into the development of the new show from Stan's Cafe, and a chance to see their unique spin on benshi narration.

For their new theatre show, A Translation of Shadows, Stan’s Cafe are reimagining what it is to be a benshi. By way of a warm-up (the show proper opens at Warwick Arts Centre in April), they will provide live narration tonight for a screening of Yasujiro Ozu’s beautiful 1933 film Woman of Tokyo. They will then wrestle with the challenge of narrating a more recent movie sequence, and screen a small section of their own film Shadows, shot last year in and around Tokyo as raw material for the new performance.

Afterwards, Stan’s Cafe Artistic Director James Yarker and filmmaker Oliver Clark will join Japanese film specialist Alastair Phillips (University of Warwick) to discuss the art of benshi, how to film in Japan on a micro budget, and why we fall in love with movie stars.