Visit the UCLA Film & Television Archive website to learn more about upcoming screenings and events.

Free admission. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Screening 1 of 2

Like Nothing Happened

Year: 2003
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Runtime: 43 min.
Digital. Color

It’s understandable if, at the end of Like Nothing Happened, one finds oneself in agreement with the title. Four college students, old friends and new acquaintances, spend an afternoon at a racetrack and then go their separate ways. Loose and grainy, it looks and feels like a sketch but shot at a time when writer-director-actor Ryusuke Hamaguchi says he was interested in “how to arrange the gazes of characters,” there’s a lot working under the surface. Structured around the kind of conversational set pieces that would become hallmarks of Hamaguchi’s later films, including an extended Dadaist recitation of dictionary definitions on a train, Like Nothing Happened feels very much like where it all began.—Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm

Director/Screenwriter: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tomo Matsui, Hideyuki Okamoto.

Screening 2 of 2

Passion

Year: 2008
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Runtime: 117 min.
Digital. Color.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's graduate thesis film at Tokyo University of the Arts, Passion prefigures the more complex and assured Happy Hour as a seemingly tight-knit group of friends and lovers falls apart as they navigate the transition to the next phases of their lives. Here, like Hamaguchi himself at the time, the carefully class-coded characters are younger, just entering careers, marriage and parenthood — or else grasping for ways to put them off. The capriciousness of desire emerges as a force and an excuse in a series of high-wire dialogue scenes as Hamaguchi explores the ethics of coupling and camerawork alike.—Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm

Director/Screenwriter: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With: Aoba Kawai, Ryuta Okamoto, Kiyohiko Shibukawa.