Pop’s Cult Theater: Bye Bye Love + Looking For An Angel

Pop’s Cult Theater is here! Every month, we’ll be curating a double feature featuring flicks that are a little bit weird, a little bit different, and a whole lot of kickass.

For our first month, we’re bringing two recently restored Japanese “Pink Films” courtesy of our friends Kani Releasing. The first film, Bye Bye Love (1974), is about a fast, unlikely romance between a nihilistic drifter and femme shoplifter who both end up on the lam for murder. The Japanese queer landmark explores societal malaise, free love and gender fluidity in rapidly evolving 1970s Japan, as both Utamaro and Giko get to know each other on the road, by way of a variety of psychedelic and frank sexual encounters.

Next, Looking for an Angel (1999) follows Shinpei, a country boy newly arrived to Tokyo, who is processing the murder of Takachi, a gay performer known for his porno tapes. Reckoning with this death against the backdrop of a deeply nostalgic, blue-hued city shot in a variety of formats ranging from 8mm to video, the viewer begins to piece together Takachi’s desire-laden story, in a free-associative and completely independent film described by director Akihiro Suzuki himself as “neither straight, gay, queer, bisexual, asexual or pornographic, but anti-heterosexist.”