Don’t miss this rare screening of acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiro Suwa’s The Lion Sleeps Tonight (2017), the closing event of In the Realm of Acting: Performance On and Off Screen, a season exploring the fluidity of performance, identity, illusion, and truth through a collection of rare and underseen films from across periods and geographies.

Legendary French New Wave actor Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Jean, an ageing film star struggling to perform his character’s death. When the production is unexpectedly suspended, he retreats to an abandoned house where Juliette (Pauline Etienne), the great love of his life, once lived. There, he encounters a group of local children searching for a lead actor for their homemade horror film. Born out of a filmmaking workshop led by Nobuhiro Suwa, reality and fantasy mingle freely, sidestepping simple naturalism. The film places the children’s cinematic encounter and their playful, curious interaction with Léaud at its heart. It captures with rare purity the relationship between those in front of the camera and those behind it, and what emerges as performance from that exchange. Suwa’s collective filmmaking approach invites us to rethink the possibilities of a shared act of creation.

French with English subtitles, 103 mins.

The screening will be followed by an online Q&A with Nobuhiro Suwa, hosted by season curator Yuriko Hamaguchi.

Born in Hiroshima in 1960, Nobuhiro Suwa began filmmaking as a student and later worked as an assistant director for radical filmmakers including Gakuryu Ishii. He went on to make television documentaries before directing his first feature, 2/Duo (1997). His follow-up, M/Other (1999), won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Suwa’s subsequent films include H Story (2001), a reimagining of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, and Voices in the Wind (2020), made on his return to Japan after years working in France. A hallmark of Suwa’s cinema is its improvisational method and collaborative approach, reflecting his belief in filmmaking as a space of dialogue rather than singular authorship. Suwa currently teaches at the Graduate School of Tokyo University of the Arts, while leading Le cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse (Cinema, One Hundred Years of Youth), an internationally acclaimed film education programme for young people.

Yuriko Hamaguchi is an MA student in Film Studies, Programming and Curation at the National Film and Television School.

Ticket: Subject to ICA ticketing policy (concessions and discounts available)