Ghost Magnet Roach Motel at Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 207
(https://festival.vconline.org/2017/films/ghost-magnet-roach-motel/)
Visual artist and musician Shinpei Takeda (THE CLOSEST MEXICO TO JAPAN, LAAPFF 2009) returns to Festival Week with a passion project very much in sync with his artistic bent as a global citizen invested in breaking down cultural borders and traditions. GHOST MAGNET ROACH MOTEL is not only the name of the art punk collective musical group he is part of but also, the documentary he has created to chronicle his band’s professional and personal journey as individuals and as a group. Comprised of a Japanese multimedia artist, two American musicians, and two Mexican visual artists and based in San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, the group’s existence and work present us with an intercultural view of artistic collaboration complete with both literal and figurative “border-crossing.”
Mixing elements of the road movie, experimental cinema, and the tour film, Takeda brings us his own brand of the punk musical documentary, which he has coined as “punkformance” (the mixture of punk music and performance art). Employing use of aggressive sound design and gritty shot selection and fusing together his worlds of punk rock music and visual artistry, he serves up both a one-two punch of both the joys and challenges of DIY musicianship and the personal demons of those creative personalities often involved. Drummer Brian Sueda’s on-and-off drug addiction, for instance, gets his bandmates to enact an intervention and escort him down to a rehab center south of the border in order to seek treatment. The band as an ad-hoc family unit saves Sueda’s life as one bandmate intuitively chimes in, “You didn’t hate your life when you play with Ghost Magnet […]”
In the humble, grand tradition of guerilla-style filmmaking and aesthetics, Takeda melds and mixes various visual styles in his vérité camerawork, media formats, and B/W and color shooting flexing to whatever mood he wants to convey at any given moment. In doing so, he hopes to immerse his audience, both filmic and music, into a fully sensational, auditory and visual experience that should not be missed.
— Melanie Ramos, with additional contributions by Lindy Leong
Community Partners: Giant Robot, Save Music in Chinatown
Director’s Bio
Shinpei Takeda is a Japanese artist and filmmaker based in Tijuana, Mexico and Düsseldorf, Germany. His works involve a wide range of themes regarding memories and history. His recent projects include Alpha Decay, Beta Decay, and Antimonument. He is also the director of Ghost Magnet Roach Motel, the punkformance unit from Tijuana and the main topic of the movie.
Credits
Producers: Shinpei Takeda, Adriana Trujillo
Director: Shinpei Takeda
Photography: Joey Muñoz, Johann Leitner
Art Director: Daniel Ruanova
Sound Mix: Jose Inerzia
Music: Tony Cozano, Brian Sweda, Julio Orozco
Editors: Shinpei Takeda, Margit Bauer