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Left: Storytellers (2013), Right: Asako I & II (2018).When the Covid-19 pandemic (which health justice activists have been calling a “mass disabling event”) waylaid plans to film Drive My Car in Busan, South Korea, Ryusuke Hamaguchi was initially unenthusiastic about his producer’s suggestion to instead shoot in Hiroshima. In Esprit, he explains his worry that it was too heavy-handed a location, both because of the city’s history and his own. Understanding why requires us to rewind to March 2011, when another social and environmental crisis brought into relief the major themes of his work, notably a focus on disability and its relationship to storytelling, performance, and the power and politics of listening.In the months following the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake, media outlets likened the Japanese government’s expedient response to Hiroshima’s miraculous rebirth after WWII. Meanwhile, filmmakers were seeding an artistic counter-response, documenting the individual voices buried under a homogenized,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWerner Herzog is set to publish his first novel, a semi-fictional retelling of the story of Hiroo Onda. A friend of Herzog, Onda is a former Japanese soldier known for spending 29 years in the jungle on an island in the Philippines, refusing to surrender at the end of World War II. Penguin Random House states that the novel is written in "an inimitable, hypnotic style—part documentary, part poem, and part dream." Following his erotic nunsploitation film Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven is making the erotic political thriller Young Sinner. The film, according to Verhoeven and RoboCop co-writer Edward Neumeier, will take place in Washington DC and focus on a young staffer "drawn into a web of international intrigue and danger." As this is a Verhoeven film, Neumeir promises that there will be "also be a little sex.