Yayoi Kusama: I Love ME

CANADIAN PREMIERE | Winner of the Audience Award at the 2008 JAPAN CUTS Festival of New Japanese Film in New York, this highly anticipated documentary profiles the avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), a polka-dot-loving eminence recognized throughout the international art world. Kusama is one of the most influential and most collected artists of the 1960s; this film follows her in her later years, working on a massive solo exhibition. At once an endearing and an intimidating character, Kusama has been widely quoted as saying "If I didn’t make art, I’d probably be dead by now." This film captures Kusama’s creative process as she diligently works to complete a new series of 50 large monochrome drawings. As each work comes to completion, we witness the essence of Kusama’s art welling up in the conflict between life, death, and love. Sometimes this process is a quiet one; sometimes just the opposite. Her firm self-confidence and dignified spirit are captured in a year-and-a-half’s worth of invaluable footage, allowing viewers never-a-dull-moment access to Kusama’s world, and revealing her eccentricities, self-obsession and intense dedication to her art. Colour, digital video, in Japanese with English subtitles. 102 mins.

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