A bold, potent collaboration, Ryoya Shigeno and Masaya Muraishi's Fatherless seduces the
viewer with the autobiography of a young man's struggle to find a father's love.
Muraishi understands his solitary Tokyo life as an intertwining knot of desire for men and an unresolved
paternal estrangement. Leaving his Tokyo days of "barely living"--the nights of solace with
anonymous substitute fathers in Ueno's toilets and love-hotels and an anguished desire to mutilate
himself into feeling--the 22-year-old Muraishi heads home to struggle with a stepfather's hostility,
a mother's irresponsibility, a father's desertion, social prejudice against *hisabetsu buraku*, his own coming-out.

Following closely on the steps of Toichi Nakata's expert *Osaka Story*,
Muraishi and his open-ended film explode the safe, enclosed narratives of self and family that Japanese "personal"
documentary form has recently fostered. Indeed, with his skillful rejection of the paternal order of
privacy and his camera's quiet revelation of a void in the authority of the family,
one wonders if Muraishi has not touched instead upon fatherless days we all must undergo.