The Lost Dreams of Naoki Hayakawa is centered around Japanese art director Naoki Hayakawa’s recollection of his working life in the advertisement business in Tokyo, presented through interviews. Hayakawa often worked 12 to 16 hours daily, including weekends, and the immense working pressure made him develop a condition between sleep and wakefulness, where he dreamt strange and wonderful dreams. Inspired by surrealist and experimental films of the 1960s and ’70s Japan, Ane Hjort Guttu (b. 1971, Oslo) and Daisuke Kosugi (b. 1984, Tokyo/Oslo) combine the documentary interview with tableaux vivants and reenactments of the protagonist's dreams. Commissioned by GB11, the film premieres at GB11.
Guttu’s practice is concerned with individuals' everyday operation within larger structures—institutions of labor, education, or politics—that define and interpellate subjectivities. Among recurrent themes in her work are the relationships between freedom and power, economy and the public space, and social change and limits of action. Between 2011 and 2015, she directed various portrait films where a central conflict reappears: Freedom Requires Free People (2011) documents an eight-year-old boy’s resistance to the restrictive nature of rules and regulations within his daily life at school. In Untitled (The City at Night) (2013), an anonymous artist refuses to display her work in a complete withdrawal from the art world, as she finds it, as a social and economic system, contradictory to what it claims to be. The same inquiry occurs in Time Passes (2015): The art student Damla enters a performance project where she begs on the street together with a gypsy girl from Romania, and soon starts to question whether this art project is ethically and politically defendable in the face of immense social inequality.
The Lost Dreams of Naoki Hayakawa is developed in close collaboration with artist Daisuke Kosugi. In his artistic practice, Kosugi draws on his former education in law to analyze poetic creation in situations of conflict between individuals and regulations. AM
self-presentation:
Watching The Great Color Eater by Norwegian playwright Tor Åge Bringsværd, The Norwegian Theatre, Oslo, 1976
All my drawing before I quit, 1971–1992
Attending Marxism study circle, Oslo, 1986
Being exposed to leftovers from underground urban night life on my way to school, Tokyo, 1994–1997
Teaching, particularly a Kafka course, 2000, and drawing course, 2006, as well as a course in Ramallah, 2011
Participating in introductory course for legal sociology, Tokyo, 2002
Having children, 2002 and 2005
Working as a risk consultant at an insurance company in Tokyo, 2007–2009
Moving to Norway and starting to study art, 2009–2014
Seeing eight of Peter Watkins’ films, 2011
Having a conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi and realizing that my rejection of my previous lifestyle was art in form of action, 2013
Meeting with my uncle Yuji and witnessing his ability to follow his impulses, 2015
