Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2012

Yutaka Tsuchiya is someone who has thought a lot about our relationship with media. A successful filmmaker with documentary and feature awards from international festivals, he considers himself first and foremost a “media activist.” He is the head of Video Act, an artistic collective that supports independent media in Japan, and modestly credits himself after “a video by…” in his films, which are cobbled together with footage from a dizzying array of sources.

His work is also evolving along with the technology it reflects. His first feature, 2003’s Peep “TV” Show was composed largely of security camera footage. “That film was about the surveillance of society,” the director says, “but in the nine years since, the internet has expanded and social networking has taken off. Now we are actively putting ourselves out there to be observed.”

His latest work, GFP Bunny, which picked up the “Japanese Eye” award for best independent Japanese film at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, is loosely based on the real case of a Japanese teenager who kept a blog on her “experiment” of slowly poisoning her mother. In the film, the unnamed high-school student coldly records results in blog posts and cell phone snapshots. While the devices serve to distance the character from the horrible acts, they make them all the more shocking for the viewer.

• GFP Bunny is scheduled for release early next year
• http://gfp-bunny.info