Interviewing director Mark Gill about his feature “Ravens,” which debuts in Japanese theaters March 28, was a peculiar experience for me because I’m in the film. Well, the back of my head is, for about a second.
In the fall of 2023, I spent a couple days on the set of the film as a background actor, mostly because I was fascinated by its subject: Masahisa Fukase, the celebrated Japanese photographer whose work includes striking black-and-white photos of the psychedelic party scene of 1960s Shinjuku, loving and obsessive portraits of his wife, Yoko Wanibe, and soulful shots of the ravens of his home prefecture of Hokkaido.
Gill, who is from Stretford, England, and made his full-length directorial debut with the 2017 feature “England is Mine,” first came across Fukase a decade ago through an article in The Guardian.
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