DUAL CITY   is the second film in director HASEGAWA Yokna’s
sci-fi trilogy. In 2034, Japan remains fractured along a northsouth
divide. Yoriko, a nurse living in the civil war-torn north,
learns that her daughter-a victim of the war-might still
be alive in the form of an “information life.” Vulnerable and
virtually helpless, Yoriko heads south with a group of guerrilla
terrorists to search for her daughter. As Yoriko meets people
from diverse backgrounds and starts to see things from new
perspectives, the story traces her transformation in overcoming
grief and cultivating a new future with her companions.
According to Hasegawa, the idea for the “information life” motif
at the heart of the work came from the potential arcs of the
world’s current trajectory: the possibility that we might soon live
in a world where we can render online knowledge and emotions as vast quantities of data, making it possible to “copy” human minds in bits and bytes of information.

HASEGAWA Yokna, DUAL CITY, 2015 / 100 min. / Dialogue in Japanese (with English subtitles)