Kani Releasing has picked up North American rights to Isao Fujisawa’s 1974 cult queer classic Bye Bye Love, a film once feared lost to time. Kani Releasing plans to bring the film to U.S. arthouse theaters in late 2025, followed by a select VOD placement and home video release.
For decades, Bye Bye Love, Fujisawa’s only fictional feature, was considered lost, as the only known screening print had deteriorated to such an extent that is was no longer able to withstand projection. But the film’s original negative fortuitously resurfaced in a Tokyo film lab’s warehouse in 2018, and Japanese producer and director Akihiro Suzuki (Looking for an Angel) has been championing the film’s restoration and revival ever since.
Suzuki’s own work, along with scores of other jishu eiga (self-produced films), were deeply influenced by Bye Bye Love, as the film became one of the most widely seen indie features of Japan’s 1970s counterculture. Kani Releasing has also picked up all North American rights to Suzuki’s Looking for an Angel (1999), which he made with direct inspiration from Bye Bye Love.
Fujisawa learned the craft he would channel into Bye Bye Love by working as an assistant director to Hiroshi Teshigahara on several 1970s Japanese New Wave classics like Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another. Fujisawa later went on to work in television and to direct documentaries, but Bye Bye Love was his only fictional feature. A deeply personal reckoning with sexual identity, the film has been described by critics as bridging the distance between Jean Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses — all with impeccable style and strong anti-imperialist and existentialist themes.
Bye Bye Love follows the lost and nihilistic Utamaro, as he chances upon the non-binary Giko, a female-presenting shoplifter who immediately catches his eye. As one thing leads to another, the couple finds themselves on the lam for murder. This provides for a delightful pretext to explore rich notions of societal malaise, free love and gender fluidity in a rapidly evolving Japan as both Utamaro and Giko begin to know each other by way of a variety of surrealistic, psychedelic and frank sexual encounters.
Following the rediscovery and restoration of Bye Bye Love‘s negatives, New York’s Metrograph cinema mounted an inspired run of the film alongside Teshigahara and Fujisawa’s beloved Kobo Abe adaptations, Women of the Dunes and Face of Another.
Inspired by Bye Bye Love, Akihiro Suzuki’s debut Looking for an Angel (1999) follows Shinpei, a country boy newly arrived to Tokyo, who processes the murder of Takachi, a gay performer best known for his porno tapes. Reckoning with this act against the backdrop of a deeply nostalgic, blue-hued city shot in a variety of formats ranging from 8mm to video, the viewer begins to piece together Takachi’s desire-ladden story, in a free-associative and completely independent film described by Suzuki himself as “neither straight, gay, queer, bisexual, asexual or pornographic, but anti-heterosexist.”
“A total, out-of-the-blue, diamond-in-the-rough discovery coming to us from passionate archivists of Japanese cinema such as as Akihiro Suzuki and Collaborative Cataloguing Japan, Bye Bye Love feels like a missing piece in the continuing film history of the Japanese counter-culture — its torch carried decades later in films such as Looking for an Angel and countless other jishu eiga films unafraid to challenge the status quo with their images and spirit,” says Ariel Esteban Cayer, Kani Releasing’s co-founder and artistic director. “It’s an honor to be able to bring these films to a wider audience.”
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