Hello, everyone. My name is Mitsuhiro Toda, and I write screenplays in Japan. Originally, I was a film historian and an archaeologist of cinema. I'm a screening organizer, working to find and release films that have never been released in Japan, regardless of nationality, age, or genre. I have also screened recent Japanese independent films.
On the other hand, I am interested in the spiritual world. So the genre of my screenplays is spirituality. Or as I like to call it, "synchronicity films" or "forgiveness films".
Like many people who are interested in this field, I was abused for many years by my classmates when I was a child. I also experienced the early death of my mother when I was nine years old. What surprised me more was that my father remarried six months after my mother died. My father, who was a busy businessman, was worried about raising a small child like me, so he remarried a woman he had been introduced to by an acquaintance. He died when I was thirty years old, so I live with my stepmother.
Through these experiences, I came to feel that it is very strange to be born and die, and to meet someone. The invisible world, the universe, God, angels, spirits, heavenly destiny, fate, yoga, reincarnation.... A lot of people start to get interested in these things. What is the "Force" in "Star Wars"? That's how I feel. So I came across a book called "A Course In Mircles". This book explains the relationship between forgiveness and miracles, and I was very much influenced by this book.
It was when I was in the 5th grade of elementary school, and at that time I wanted to die because my classmates were abusing me so badly. They kicked me so hard that I cut my mouth. As I was washing it off in the tap, a girl from my class approached me from behind and asked, "How's your injury?" She gave me a white handkerchief. At the time, I thought the whole world was full of enemies, so I thought she was an angel. I was so happy that I thought she was an angel. But I was so exhausted from the abuse that I didn't even dare to say thank you.
There was a junior high school reunion in 2012, and I attended it, even though many of my former "enemies" were there. "I had read A Course In Miracles, so I no longer had a problem reconnecting with them. I don't want to go into the details of this internal change, because it would make this already lengthy article impossibly long, longer than the running time of a Michael Cimino movie, but anyway, this was the effect of the "forgiveness" that "A Course In Miracles" had taught me. I was able to enjoy the reunion. But anyway, I enjoyed the reunion and found out about the girl who gave me the white handkerchief, and later I went to thank her for that time.
Of course, she didn't remember such a long time ago, but she was happy with tears in her eyes that I was still alive. Immediately after that, I decided to write a script using this incident. So I started writing a script in which such an event happens to the main character's mother and the main character learns "a Course In Miracles" from her classmates.
As a non-professional, it took me a huge amount of time to finish it, from May 2012 to June last year. Well, it turned out to be a long story, but that's another story.
Well, well! I have to make a movie out of this. But what should I do?
That's when I was told about this Stage 32, and I registered a few days ago.
I couldn't find any filmmakers around me who were interested in Spiritualism. Rather, this field is untouched in the Japanese film industry, only somewhat visible in documentary films. With this platform, I think I can find collaborators. Thank you for this encounter. Thank you for reading.
Mitsuhiro Toda
The photo shows one of the stages, Soni Village, Nara Prefecture, Japan.
1 person likes this
Hey, Mitsuhiro Toda! Great to meet you, and welcome to the community! Wow, what a cool background and mission! I actually studied Reiki before I became a massage therapist as part of my martial arts training. I have heard that the requirements for Reiki healing here in the U.S. are not nearly as strict as in Japan (e.g. I'm not a vegetarian), but I can still very much attest to its transformational effects on one's life.
Where are you at with your script? Are you looking for feedback for your next revision, or are you ready to start pitching it to executives? Let us know how we can aid you on your journey!
1 person likes this
Thank you , Karen "Kay" Ross! Glad you know about Reiki Healing. Martial artists are very faithful to spiritual truths. I feel the same way when I watch karate and kata in yesterday's Olympics.
I'm glad to read your great advice in your email. I think in a community like this, it is better for my problems to be visible, so I will reveal them.
The reason I came here is that it seems difficult to make a film in the Japanese film environment. First of all, there is the fact that people in the film industry are not interested in Spiritualism. Then there is a way to self-produce a film with followers of Spiritualism. However, many of them have negative attitudes toward the film because of its violent content, which makes cooperation difficult.
Since "ACIM" was released in the U.S., when I first started writing the script, I somehow felt that it would be better to invite a U.S. film production team to Japan to produce the film. So, I went back to that original thought. That's how I came to join this project. So, you have to read the script.
Problems
The script is very long, just over 900 pages in a WORD document.
Since the story is set in Japan, the script is written in Japanese.
So an English translation was necessary.
However, I can hardly translate it into English.
(This sentence was also written using the translation function on the Internet.)
There is a lot of dialogue about ACIM and yoga philosophy, so even if I were to hire a translator who is familiar with such things, it would be too costly for me to do it myself.
I have an idea of what kind of paper and amount of text would be appropriate for the length of the film, and I wish I could have made it something that would have been suitable for 95 to 120 minutes.
It took ten years for the Buddha to be enlightened. It takes a lot of time and a lot of experience for the light to shine in a person's heart. A script that depicts such an event will be profound in its own way. The film is in three parts, so it can be shown or distributed separately. There are many examples of American filmmakers who have made films with a lot of Japanese in them, such as "Letters from Iwo Jima" and Martin Scorsese's "Silence," so I don't think it's impossible. However, the problem at hand is the English translation.
I am currently seeking advice from various people on this issue.
I can't even figure out how to link the names of others who post here to their profiles.
This is another problem I'm having.
Thank you ,Rohit Kumar!
Mira Nair, Girish Kasaravalli, Rima Das, Lijo Poleseri, check it out. In the play, there is a scene where a yoga master talks about the contents of The Bhagavad Gita in Sat Sanga. There is also a scene where a disciple of the master talks about the contents of The Yoga Sutras and explains the words of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
I found out that Anshul Chauhan's "Bad Poetry Tokyo" was screened at the Osaka Asian Film Festival, which I am no longer involved with, in 2018. I was a member of the selection committee for the annual top ten at the Osaka Cinema Festival, which is a related festival to this one, so I was also interviewing Asian directors at the time. I'm sure Kunihiko Tomioka, who runs these film festivals, would know Anshul Chauhan. Kunihiko Tomioka has taught me many things. He wrote the screenplays for Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films. "There seems to be a Japanese woman named Mina Moteki at KOWATANDA FILMS, and I will try to send her a message myself through LinkedIn.
Thanks for the information. Thank you for the information and please connect with me if you can. I'll send you a request.
I also like Guru Dutt, Baazi, Mr. & Mrs. '55, Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool. Kaagaz Ke Phool
When I think about it, I have the soundtrack to "Monsoon Wedding".
1 person likes this
Thank you Rohit Kumar!
"Bahubali" is the first Indian movie to hit the big screen in Japan in a very long time, beating "Muthu" at the box office and helping to create a lot of Indian movie crazies. They don't watch musicals by sisters Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, but they do watch the latest Indian movies with enthusiasm. They will watch the delightful Farah Khan's "Om Shanti Om," for example, where they learn about spiritual concepts such as reincarnation. It's a fun movie, but the truth is, if we're going to portray someone's life in a serious way, it's inevitable that we're going to portray people coming into the world, getting sick, and dying, so it's going to be spiritual in some way. This is the very reality that the Buddha knew when he came out of the four gates, and this is what led him to become ordained.
However, I don't occasionally write a script that talks about spiritual concepts in order to give them a spiritual nuance. Rather, I made it a script that tells a spiritual story all the time. Why is "forgiveness" the key to miracles? I decided that I needed to convey it fairly accurately.
Of course, I know that most filmmakers will probably make a film with the aim of getting them to feel it without explaining it. In Japan, some people still say that a good movie is a movie with few lines, and it is best to explain it only by the movement of people and things on the screen. He says the movie was originally silent. In Japan, even in the silent movie era, there were people who explained in words according to the rhythm of the cut called Katsudo-benshi, so Japanese people had never seen a true silent movie! There is no point in telling a story if you give a speech like Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" and say everything at the end. "The Great Dictator" is an anti-cinema, and Buster Keaton is far greater! Some people still say that. Sure, I don't have a DVD of Chaplin's movie, but I love the slapstick comedy by Buster Keaton, Roscoe Arbuckle, Al St. John and Luke the Dog, and I also have a DVD. But I disagree with this disdain for Chaplin.
The dialogue is the trigger for the cut, so it is actually the action itself. The editor is actually breaking the cut that way. Being aware of that, I wrote a spiritual topic without fear. In fact, the episodes have a lot of comedic play, and "The Holy Spirit in Ultramarine" is an entertainment movie. It's an entertainment movie that Quentin Tarantino might have seen before, much more than Abbas Kiarostami. Well, it might be too long for Quentin Tarantino.
Yoga is popular in Europe and the United States because Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda have taken the plunge on an adventurous journey. And for me, Guru Dutt and Ritwik Ghatak are also senior adventurers who played the same role as Vivekananda and Yogananda. There were great seniors in different fields of yoga and film. And we are. Either partial or full expression can be used, but more spiritual films are long-awaited. That is clear from the situation in the world. Then I decided to go on an adventure. Since this is an adventure, I thought it would be okay to express it differently.
Is this really a dialogue taking place in the film community? Yes, that's right. A dialogue about movies. Film is a part of our lives, so it has to be spiritual.
Thank you for your friendship. Check out "The Guide"!
Sumon Ali, thank you!
It's a Marcelo Grion movie. I interacted with him and just registered on youtube. The exchange is about Maradona and Messi.
Oh! Wally Wu, thanks so much.
1 person likes this
Thank you for sharing!
2 people like this
Hi, Rutger Oosterhoff .
2 people like this
Yes Childhood can be brutal....turning into great art can be therapeutic as you know. That sounds like it would make a very important movie... Looking forward to hearing how you continue.
1 person likes this
Welcome, Mitsuhiro! Nice to meet you. Glad you're here. Childhood sucks no matter where you come from, so that idea alone has me interested.
1 person likes this
こんにちは
Horror Author and Manga Writer/Illustrator. Japan has been a big influence for my work and art.