Japanese films often take photographers as their protagonists. The popularity of photography here as an art and hobby gives filmmakers a large potential audience for a photographer-centered story, be it fictional or biographical. It helps if the subject has some sort of international cachet.
One such person was war photographer Taizo Ichinose, depicted in the Sho Igarashi biopic “One Step on a Mine, It's All Over” (1999). Tadanobu Asano starred as the intrepid-but-doomed Ichinose, who was killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1973.
In Mark Gill’s visually lush, superbly acted “Ravens,” Asano portrays another real-life photographer, Masahisa Fukase, whose controversial and experimental work was widely exhibited and celebrated before his death in 2012. Though the film traces Fukase’s life from his professional beginnings to the accident that ended his career, it is not a straightforward biopic.
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