A workshop given by Felicity Tillack, Sept. 23, 2023 at Ryukoku University Omiya Campus

Writers in Kyoto member Felicity Tillack, a writer, director and cinematographer, held a screenwriting workshop for WiK members late last month, in which she offered far more than writing tips.

Tillack candidly shared insight based on her own experience, and allowed the audience a look at the nuts and bolts of writing a script and then turning it into an independent film. The event gave attendees a look into another world, which challenged our preconceptions of filmmaking. At least I know it challenged mine.

Her workshop came shortly before the debut of Tillack’s latest project, Dis/Connected, a bilingual series of short episodes – some of them musical – exploring how technology can both bridge and fracture human connections, through the interactions of its four characters. A new episode is released each day on Instagram, starting this month: https://www.instagram.com/dis_connectedseries/.

Tillack began the workshop by asking participants to go around the room and write their answers to various questions, such as how film is different from/similar to other genres, what is needed to make a film, etc. She then passed out copies of actual film scripts – her own, as well as others written by both amateurs and professionals – and we broke into smaller groups to discuss them before everyone reassembled to share our observations and questions with each other.

Here’s a true confession: most of what I knew about the film industry, I learned from living in Los Angeles for about five years in the mid-1990s. Almost everyone I encountered there, from my dentist to the woman who rang up my groceries, seemed to be involved in film in some way – auditioning for roles, trying to get people at studios to read their treatments, pitching ideas to whoever would listen. Our next-door neighbor was a visual effects artist, and we watched the credits at the end of Titanic to see his name among thousands of others. Even so-called “low-budget indie” films seemed to require funding equal to some small countries’ annual GDP, so I came to believe that it was impossible to make any kind of film without first raising a significant chunk of cash.

To my surprise, Tillack told us that her 2019 debut feature film, Impossible to Imagine, was made for around a million yen. (See the review by Jann Williams.) Tillack showed clips from it at her workshop, and summarized it for those of us (including me) who had not seen it.

Ami Shimizu, played by Yukiko Ito, is a Kyoto woman struggling to keep her late mother’s kimono rental shop afloat. She hires Hayato Arai, a biracial Japanese business consultant played by William Yagi Lewis, to give her advice on how to attract some of the foreign tourists thronging to the city. The two develop a romantic connection despite their different backgrounds and experiences. The film takes its title from Ami’s inability to picture any kind of shared life together with Hayato, despite their strong feelings for each other.

A few weeks after Tillack’s event, I watched Impossible to Imagine with my 21-year old biracial son, who grew up mostly in Tokyo. We both enjoyed it, and recognized some of the Kyoto locations. I was happy to hear him say he didn’t share most of the Arai character’s identity problems of being caught between two worlds and not fitting in anywhere. But my son said he recognizes that his life might have been quite different had he grown up in a more conservative part of Japan – such as Kyoto, where he’s made countless trips over the years to visit his paternal grandparents.

A native of Australia, Tillack now lives in Kyoto herself after stints in several other cities since she moved to Japan in 2006. She started creating videos in 2012 for her Youtube channel “Where Next Japan” before she turned to making documentaries, which led her into other kinds of filmmaking.

While her successful projects were surely built on her many years of hard work and persistence, Tillack’s WiK workshop demystified many aspects of filmmaking for me, and made it look…well, perhaps still not easy, but certainly possible.

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Impossible to Imagine can be viewed on Amazon Japan. A version with English subtitles is available on Vimeo (click here) or Tubi (click here).

For a listing of Felcity Tillack’s articles and films from 2015-2020. see her Kansai Scene page.

See also her report of a Leza Lowitz talk on Fukushima.