ZAMEK Culture Centre

The late 1990s. In a remote boarding school cut off from the world, summer seems to last forever. The idyll is disrupted by the arrival of a boy who looks exactly like one of the students who has died. His appearance opens a fissure between waking and dreaming, memory and fantasy, as these begin to merge into one. Awaiting the end of summer, the students wander through the school’s empty corridors and the surrounding greenery. Immersed in the languor of the season, they experience their first infatuations.

Shūsuke Kaneko’s “Summer Vacation 1999” is a gothic dream of adolescence, a coming-of-age tale bathed in a retrofuturistic atmosphere reminiscent of Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. The all-female cast playing male students lends the story an androgynous tone, heightening the tension between gender and sexual identity. Kaneko captures the spiritual condition of the 1980s - a decade marked by uncertainty and suspension - through a suffocating, hypnotic vision of isolation and loneliness. In imagining the future, the director created one of the most singular portrayals of youth: a melancholic generational voice echoing the fears and desires confined within a hermetic, unreal world.

SUMMER VACATION 1999, dir. Shūsuke Kaneko, Japan 1988, 89’