SSFF & ASIA & NTT’s Collaboration Short Film Made with World Film Makers and Leading Science and Technology Researchers on Our Future

10 May 2023

What is the ideal of a humane life?

Short film, “NEO PORTRAITS” opens today at Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2023

TOKYO, May 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — “Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia (SSFF & ASIA) 2023″ collaborates with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) to create a form of coexistence of scientific and technological innovation and the ideal of a humane life.

Produced the short film, “NEO PORTRAITS,” a collaborative project with creators and audiences around the world. Today, May 10th (Wednesday), the world premiere will be on the SSFF & ASIA YouTube channel. URL: https://shortshorts.org/ntt/en/

NEO PORTRAITS Directed / Witten / Edited by GAZEBO／SF Drama／19:51/2023 Draft "What a Wonderful World" Written by qurata kenji (KURUWA.LLC). A story of rural Japan in the near future. "Cutting-edge technology" and "things that haven't changed" coexist in this depopulated town. Takumi, an eighth-year junior high school student, felt it strange that the adults in his town treated the android made in his mother's image as the real thing. However, only Hana, his homeroom teacher, was different. — NEO PORTRAITS Directed / Witten / Edited by GAZEBO／SF Drama／19:51/2023 Draft "What a Wonderful World" Written by qurata kenji (KURUWA.LLC). A story of rural Japan in the near future. "Cutting-edge technology" and "things that haven’t changed" coexist in this depopulated town. Takumi, an eighth-year junior high school student, felt it strange that the adults in his town treated the android made in his mother’s image as the real thing. However, only Hana, his homeroom teacher, was different.

This project grew out of the SSFF & ASIA 2022 Online Closing Seminar NTT presents International Conference for visualizing our future brought about by technological innovation feat. IOWN.

“IOWN” is regarded by many companies, including NTT, as a technology with the potential to change the game in realizing new smart societies. A panel of experts gathered from various fields, including the Natural Society Lab, which considers people’s lives, the executive producer of the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, a professor of the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo, and overseas directors who have won the Grand Prix and other awards at SSFF & ASIA.

At the conference, we discussed how to realize a coexistence between the development of science and technology and the ideal of a humane life as visual images. When the emergence of human clones and the birth of eternal life are realized through technological innovation, will human society become a utopia? New technologies require new philosophies, thinking of not only “Self-as-I” and “You,” but the idea of perceiving the whole related to “Self-as-We.” Short film pitchings were solicited from film makers around the world, and from the large number of applications, a draft “What a Wonderful World” written by qurata kenji（KURUWA.LLC）was selected and made into the short film, “NEO PORTRAITS” (Director/Screenplay/Editor: GAZEBO).

Koji Fukada, director of “Sayonara”＞

As with Hugo Gernsback’s “Ralph 124C41+,” an artist’s fantasies often foresee the future and act as invisible hands to direct people into a new society. “NEO PORTRAITS,” which gives us a vivid glimpse of life in the future through simple ideas, also gives a gentle push though our hands are confused and tremble with anxiety. It seemed to me that the trembling is the essence of this form of expression.

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SOURCE Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia