The young Amiko is obsessed with her classmate Aomi, a cool soccer player, a Radiohead fan, with whom she goes on a short, memorable stroll through the park. There begins a fixation that carries over the entire school year: a period during which Amiko dare not speak to the boy, though she obsesses over him with every waking thought. So when he dares run away to the big city to live his own life, Amiko becomes determined to find him, and tell him how she really feels, on a journey that will take her from her banal home town of Nagano to the busy, anonymous streets of Tokyo. 

Before Desert of Namibia, Yoko Yamanaka premiered Amiko, described as a “distant cousin of Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro” by way of the uniquely DIY spirit of the Japanese self-made films (jishu-eiga) of the 1970s and 1980s: a gleefully irreverent, crystalline sour-sweet confection of extreme emotions, forged in the fiery pits of adolescence. Having dropped out of college herself to pursue this first feature, Yamanaka subverts the image of the schoolgirl into a strong counter-cultural figure, revealing what should become a cult character: a young punk in seifuku, resisting apathy, mass culture – and a boy’s indifference – one blazing conviction at a time. Shot with available means and a bathtub-full of mouth-puckering passion, the Pia Film Festival-awarded and Berlinale-selected Amiko established Yamanaka as a filmmaker to watch.