Ako
1965 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Sixteen-year-old Ako works in a bakery while seeking freedom from restrictive traditions. Dreamlike images and fragmented dialogue follow her daily routine.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Teshigahara's using dreamlike fragmentation to undercut the coming-of-age script—so it's neither quite surrealist provocation nor sincere adolescent drama, which means it mostly just floats. The contrarian move would've been to commit harder to the weirdness and let the bakery job dissolve entirely.
A precise formal study in how montage and fragmented sound design can stage the interior resistance of a young woman against social constraint—Teshigahara's working in the lineage of structural modernism, and every compositional choice (the repetition, the ellipsis) serves that argument with real rigor.
The magic lives in those moments where a mundane bakery gesture—kneading, waiting, a glance—suddenly stretches into something suspended and strange, achieved almost entirely through editing rhythm and the deliberate absence of explanatory dialogue.