Before Desert of Namibia, Yoko Yamanaka premiered Amiko, described as a “distant cousin of Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro” by way of the uniquely DIY spirit of the self-produced film (jishu eiga) tradition.

The young Amiko is obsessed with her classmate Aomi, a cool soccer player and Radiohead fan, with whom she goes on a short, but memorable stroll through the park. There begins a fixation that carries over the entire school year: a period during which she dares not speak to the boy, though she obsesses over him with every waking thought. So when he run away to the big city to pursue his own life, Amiko becomes determined to find him, and tell him how she really feels, on a journey that will take her from her banal home town of Nagano to the bustling, anonymous streets of Tokyo. 

Amiko is a gleefully irreverent, crystalline sour-sweet confection of extreme emotions, forged in the fiery pits of adolescence. Having dropped out of college herself to pursue this first feature, Yamanaka subverts the image of the schoolgirl into a strong counter-cultural figure, revealing what should become a cult character: a young punk in seifuku, resisting apathy, mass culture and a boy’s indifference one fistful of conviction at a time. Shot with available means and a bathtub-full of mouth-puckering passion, this Pia Film Festival-awarded and Berlinale-selected film established Yamanaka as one to watch.