Blue Spring

NYAFF is honored to present a special 35mm screening of Toshiaki Toyoda’s seminal classic Blue Spring. This groundbreaking, provocative film captured the malaise and disillusionment of a generation of youth coming of age at the turn of the millennium in a post-bubble Japan, where the norms of the past felt irrelevant and the future uncertain. With serious verve and a roiling badass soundtrack, this tale of power and rebellion grabs the viewer and doesn’t let go. In their graduation year, disaffected students turn their concrete box of a school into a backdrop against which to create their own version of society. The newly elected boss Kujo (Ryuhei Matsuda) disdains all the rules, including those that have led to his election. Into this power vacuum, his scandalized friend and lieutenant Aoki (Hirofumi Arai) enters with vicious intent. As graduation looms, the pupils study violence and death.