Millennium Actress (2001)

Millennium Actress follows documentarian Genya Tachibana as he interviews retired legendary actress Chiyoko Fujiwara. As the interview progresses, the line between on-screen and off-screen gets increasingly blurred.

Chiyoko Fujiwara is a composite character who is based on famous Japanese actresses like Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine.

I think this will be a good introduction to the work of legendary animation director Satoshi Kon. His style is characterized by his ability to blend the real and surreal worlds together using stellar animation and editing technique.

This film is a celebration of Japanese cinema and contains many reference to different films. I firmly believe you do not need to understand all the references to enjoy the film, many of them went straight over my head. However, if you are interested, then I point you to this blog post I found which breaks some of them down: https://blog.alltheanime.com/millennium-actress-japanese-film/

As usual, I encourage watching movies in their native language with subtitles but I will not hold it against you if that isn't your cup of tea.

Available on many different streaming services: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/millennium-actress

*** NOTE TO NEW MEMBERS ***
Please watch the movie before the meetup. Information to help find the films will generally be posted in the description or in the comments on the webpage. During the meetup itself, we discuss the movie, but we don't watch it. It's a book club style movie group.