箱男 / The Box Man, 2026

Mixed analogue and digital, 5 min

↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
BOX NO. 03724
The pores of my whole body opened their mouths at the same time, and tongues dangled limply from them.
The Box Man
To the box man, the act of looking is everything. Seeing without being seen is the ultimate power, but it is also the ultimate isolation.

箱男

The Box Man

A man disappears into a cardboard box.

A view of the world through a narrow slit. Doppelgangers. Mirrors. And a little bit of obsession.

A free adaptation of Kobo Abe's novel The Box Man.

The color of rain from which a beggar catches cold… the color of time when underground shops close… the color of the unredeemed watch given in commemoration of graduation from college… the color of jealousy broken on the stainless steel sink of the kitchen… the color of the first morning after losing one's job…
…the color of the ink on an identity card that has become useless… the color of the last movie ticket the candidate for suicide purchases… and other colors - the color of anonymity, of hibernation, of death as a means of relieving pain, of a hole eaten away by the strongest alkali - time.
- Look, my legs are trembling as if I'd got on top of an electric washer.
- Well, come over here. My lap's better than any washer.
DESCRIPTION The method for this work consisted of translating the physics of the gaze - the very optics of the Box Man himself - into the language of cinema, rather than translating the plot as such. As if the Box Man could print out everything he saw from inside his box, and from those printouts, a film would be edited together. Visually, I looked to the aesthetics of the avant-garde Japanese photography movement Provoke - Abe's contemporaries - with their motto of are, bure, boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus). Cinematic form thus arose organically from content.

The Box Man feels to me like the most cinematic Abe's work. The Box Man himself is a camera.

Author: Kobo Abe, Olga Losik

Cast: Alyona Glazunova, Kirill Verkhozin, Ivan Fadeyev

Screenings:

  • Aug 2026 -- Vertikaly Cinema Club of independent filmmakers, Moscow, Russia
The box is simple, but its effect is absolute. Once you enter it, the outside world changes its meaning entirely. What was once familiar becomes distant, and what was hidden becomes obvious.
I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.
TEASER
← Back to 📦     ← Back to Works