Shuji Terayama is Japan's leading avant-garde playwright-poet-filmmaker. Although best known worldwide for his theater productions, performed by his own troupe - TENJOSAJIKI (“Negro's Heaven” Troupe) - in all of the world's leading theater festivals and experimental theater environments: Experimenta 3 (Frankfurt), Theatre Des Halles (Paris), Mickery Theatre (Amsterdam), BITEF (Belgrade), Spielstrasse (Munich), Festival of Young Theatre (Warsaw), etc. Terayama has more and more become, in the general creative vacuum of Japanese Cinema and almost as a side vocation, the most exciting talent making films in Tokyo today. Before making his own films, Terayama had worked in cinema as a scenarist for Susumu Hani (Inferno Of First Love, 1968) and Masahiro Shinoda (Buraikan, 1970). His anarcho-surreal short Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971) created a scandal at home, with its mixture of outrageous sexuality and political blasphemy, but won many prizes at international film festivals. This program will include a selection of Terayama's experimental (in the best and most audacious sense of the term) shorts, some of which involve “live special effects” engineered by Terayama himself, as well as special projection set-ups. We are not sure of the final selection (Terayama has more than a dozen shorts to his credit), but we promise an extraordinary event in the 60-80 minute time range.