Submittan
2022 · 17m · Japan
Directed by Susumu Kimura
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
In the future city of Submittan, people over 80 are forced into 'retirement' to a remote mountain area, and a Japanese immigrant graphic designer is tasked with designing the propaganda poster that sells it.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dystopia that flips the usual power dynamic—instead of the protagonist resisting the machine, they're complicit in it, forced to aestheticize their own community's disposal. It's bleak, it's formally clever, and it doesn't let you off the hook with easy answers, which is exactly why most festivals will sleep on it.
Kimura's tonal control here is precise: the film sits at the intersection of Swoon's design-world anxiety and the sci-fi tradition of Glazer or Sokurov, using the poster-design conceit as both literal plot and formal mirror. It's a work acutely aware of cinema's own propagandistic image-making.
The decision to center the story on a graphic designer rather than an activist creates a wholly different moral texture—watching someone deploy their actual craft against their conscience, moment by moment, generates more tension than any action sequence. That specificity of profession is what makes the complicity feel real.