Barbican screens Millennium Actress on July 3rd

While we'll be seeing plenty of Perfect Blue over the remainder of this year, Satoshi Kon's other directorial works are just as worthy of love and adoration, so on the day that Tokyo Godfathers is slated for an Australian Blu-ray release courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment (someone please do something about bringing that to the UK), we also bring word of another Kon classic getting a big screen airing on our shores.

Namely, on Monday, 3rd July at 8:45PM, you'll be able to catch Millennium Actress if you're in the vicinity of London's Barbican, with the film screening at Cinema 3 under the title of Bigger than Life: Millennium Actress.

Here's how the Barbican themselves are promoting the screening:

One very obvious way the movies have changed the world is by giving us the movie star. 

Issues of stardom – and fandom – are at the heart of this sweeping Japanese animation by Satoshi Kon (Paprika, Perfect Blue). Actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, an icon of 1950s cinema but now retired and living in seclusion, is visited one afternoon by a devoted fan wanting to make a documentary about her career. As they – and we, the audience – plunge back into her past, we hop between events in her real and her on-screen life in roles in a variety of genres and time-periods. 

Conceived as a homage to the samurai epics, domestic dramas, space odysseys and monster movies of post-WW2 Japanese cinema, the film sets up further resonances in the character of Chiyoko herself who recalls both Hideko Takamine, an icon of hope for post-war Japanese filmgoers, and Setsuko Hara, one of Yazujiro Ozu’s favourite actresses, who disappeared from the public eye at the height of her stardom.

Standard tickets cost £10.50 - you can find more details and book tickets from the Barbican web site.