BYE BYE LOVE (Church of Film)

Two outsider youths in Shinjuku, Tamura and Giiko, turn a chance encounter fighting the cops into a crime spree on the lam, with the alluring magical hope of escaping the narrow confines of a world that has cast them aside. BYE BYE LOVE is a brilliant, poetical take on Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, with a trans woman at its center.

Long believed lost, this queer Bonnie & Clyde-meets-the children of Revlon & Marx was discovered in a warehouse in 2018, filling in one of the great mysteries of trans cinema, and revealing a masterpiece that provides a copestone for the end of Japan’s era of radical cinema.

*Screened in Japanese with English-language subtitles.*