ROMANCECAR

In 2009, on my way from Paris to Jakarta, I transited in Tokyo, the first 3 hours I spent in this country took me to a cake shop and a laundry located in a small street of Takadanobaba. They inspired me to make the piece Tokyo Moods, a 24 hour seasonal flash representation of that Tokyoite neighborhood and a collection of random distant stories with the few memories and the lack of knowledge I had at that time.

In 2021, the shops no longer exist, flash is discontinued and Tokyo Moods is not accessible anymore. I started working on my next Japanese piece that would eventually become Romancecar.

This VR piece depicts a young woman who travels alone for the first time aboard the Romancecar train and recalls her father’s story, a train nerd built by his era, deepening his fantasy and entering the modern era to finally let his daughter go and build her own story.

At the beginning of the production, Young Kano, who partly inspired the story, had never left her home, nor had she traveled alone. She was influenced a lot by her father, Shigeto, who instilled in her movies and musical references, among them, Kozo Murashita, a singer from the 70s and a train nerd who wrote a song about the Romancecar, an express train in service in the West of Tokyo, before his death.

As she prepares to leave her home for the first time, the stories she was bathed in since she was a kid come back to her like a train crew who attend her in that early life traveling.

Seeing my friends’ children growing up, getting closer to the age my parents had when I was preparing to leave the family cocoon, affected this experience.

My father’s memories, an Air France employee, a plane and volcano nerd who grew up during the French “Glorious Thirty”, who didn’t always manage to harmonize his idealism with reality, impacted my early-life journey which took me through cities, tunnels, mountains and brought me to where I am today.

I have been living in Japan for 10 years and compared to the time I made Tokyo Moods, my roots in this country have considerably deepened. Yet, I am still an alien telling distant stories about people I understand a bit better but still not much.

Unlike in Replacements, I did not experience most of the eras and materials that are depicted in Romancecar. The accuracy and the integrity I try to have in my work prevent me from going too far in my fantasy, which is why I was very careful about feedback from friends, elderly people and from the individuals who inspired the story, while still using my personal life experience to construct the story.

After a year of co-production between Cinemaleap and Odakyu, Romancecar is now finished and accessible for kids and their parents in The Romancecar museum near Tokyo.

Young Kano finally traveled alone for the first time, not on a 2 hour Romancecar train trip, but on a 13 hour Cathay Pacific plane trip.