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Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Adam Hartzell interviews Jessica Oreck
My wife loves video games, but for most of the year, this passion lays dormant.That is, until the new edition of a Japanese game called Boku no Natsuyasumi (My Summer Vacation) is released. Then she blossoms into an avid gamer, PSP always in hand.
Boku no Natsuyasumi is a game that would stun the average American — not for its violence or gore, but for the complete absence of violence and gore. It is inconceivable that such a game would even exist in the U.S. market. Boku no Natsuyasumi follows the exploits of a child doing what Japanese children do in nature, swimming in the watering hole in search of ‘treasure,’ snagging butterflies in a net for one’s collection, and capturing beetles for later battles with fellow young summer vacationers. Seeing my wife so engaged in a gaming narrative so beyond the U.S. gaming world, I was intrigued and fascinated about the untapped potential in video games. It didn’t all have to be beating people up when not killing them, or recklessly racing fast cars, or striving towards virtual union with sport celebrities. I am now aware of the non-nihilistic nature of social games such as Farmville or Foursquare, but Boku no Natsuyasumi was the first video game that helped me realize there was such potential.
This is the perspective with which I came to Jessica Oreck’s documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, an ethno-biological meditation on how a large segment of Japan’s population appreciates insects rather than fears them. Oreck is an animal keeper and docent at the American Museum of Natural History who paired her college studies of biology, ecology, and botany with filmmaking. What Oreck hopes to do with her films is to study whole cultures and how they interact with the world in order to “get people not to change the way they think about nature,” but instead to get people “to look at the way they think about nature.”
I sat down with Oreck for a brief interview at the offices of Larsen Associates to talk about her film and her experience with Japan and insects...
To read entire article, download as PDF file (53KB)
http://beetlequeen.com/
Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Trailer from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.
Synopsis here
Adam Hartzell has been writing about cinema since 1999 with a strong focus on South Korean Cinema. He is a regular contributor to Koreanfilm.org and the San Francisco Film Society Webzine sf360.org. He has also contributed to GreenCine Daily and past issues of Kyoto Journal (Issues #60 and #63). He wrote the chapter on Hong Sangsoo's film The Power of Kangwon Province for the book The Cinema of Japan and Korea,published in England through Wallflower Press and the United States through Columbia University Press. He presently resides in San Francisco, but watched fireflies in his backyard growing up outside of Cleveland in Berea, Ohio.
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