The Colors that Combine to Make White Are Important

Director: Barry Doupé
Canada, Japan; color, 120’, 2012
Japanese with Turkish subtitles

The film explores the power structure within a failing Japanese glass factory. Two parallel storylines — one involving the investigation of a suspect employee, the other a stolen painting — converge in an exposition on gender and desire. Doupé’s computer-animated film has its characters rapidly evolve through three distinct acts, while subverting the dominant archetypes in the Japanese salary man genre. The hierarchical relationship between boss and employees is undone to examine language, art, and expression. Doupé’s characters are looking for something only to be found through a crisis of feeling, a shaking up of the human world.