Mark Antony Krupa is an actor and film buff.
As the winner of five awards at the 2005 WFF in Montreal, including the most popular Canadian film, Claude Gagnon’s KAMATAKI offers viewers a rare glance into the world of traditional Japanese pottery. A process necessitating intricate care, kamataki consists of placing dozens of pots, vases, and cups in a large wood-fired oven and submitting them to extreme heat, which must be monitored at the right temperature for days in order to achieve the artist’s desired results. Gagnon crafts this kamataki process into an extremely original metaphor for seeking inner harmony amidst a furnace of conflicting passions and emotions. The cinematography elevates and anthropomorphizes the fire, making it into an almost tangible character.
As a product of North-American cinema and mass media, I have probably been brainwashed by too many fast-paced American films, but Kamataki certainly suffers from the slow-start syndrome. Perhaps Gagnon wished us to feel like we were in front of a good fire that needed time to get warmed up, but it took me a long time to start caring for the protagonist, 23 year-old Ken Antoine (Matt Smiley), who survives a failed suicide attempt after the death of his father. Unfortunately, the entire source of Ken’s pain takes place as off-camera exposition. The audience must follow a brooding man as he is sent off to Japan to live with his uncle Takuma (Tatsuya Fuji), an eccentric ceramic artist.
Takuma however does not take time to charm the audience with his woman-admiring philosophy and his karaoke performance. Almost immediately, we are led to believe it is actually possible to build a bridge between even the deepest of solitudes. Takuma becomes an authentic mentor to Ken. The conflicts between rejecting and accepting one’s lineage, along with the clash between new and old generations, permeate throughout the script and culminate in a stunning, beautifully shot scene where Ken literally embraces his tradition.
Takuma uses an anagama , the most ancient of the wood-fired kilns in Japan. By 1600 A.D, due to unpredictable results of the kamataki process, the anagamas were replaced by noborigamas - multi chambered kilns - that could produce 100 times more consistent work in much less firing time. In the early 70s, Shiho Kanzaki, a master ceramic artist and consultant to the film Kamataki, spearheaded the reintroduction of 
anagamas along with the ‘no-glazing’ technique. Let us hope that independent films such as Kamataki continue to strike archetypal chords and remind us of a mythological lineage that is too often lost in the commercial haze of fast-exploding American blockbuster films, reality shows, and video games.
For more information, visit: www.kamatakimovie.com. The film plays at AMC Forum, Cinema Beaubien, and Cinema Quartier Latin. It opens in Toronto on April 21 at Cineplex Canada Square and will be the opening film of the REEL WORLD festival in Toronto on April 19.