Grand Prize
nijuman no borei (200000 phantoms)
Visual Image
Artist : Jean-Gabriel PERIOT
(France)
A documentary footage which spun out a history by connecting an enormous quantity of documentary photography related to the A-bomb of Hiroshima with great care. A calm monolog in the background, pictures with the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima in their center are collaged and unrolled.

Jean-Gabriel PERIOT
Born in France in 1974. Directed several short movies, both in video and cinema. Develops his own editing style with archives. Most of his works deal with violence and history. His last works, including Dies Irae, Even if she had been a criminal... and nijuman no borei, were shown worldwide in numerous festivals and were honored by many prizes.
It is an honor for me, a western director, to receive the Grand Prize in Japan. I made this movie first for the Japanese. The bombings concern the world, but most victims were from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I made this movie as a memorial for those deaths and as a gift to the living. Europeans know little about the bombings and I hope to raise awareness about these tragedies. I thank the Japanese, particularly in Hiroshima, for helping my photographic archives research and those who gave their family pictures.
This work is a collage of time which shows about 90-year history of the Atomic Bomb Dome which was opened as a produce museum of Hiroshima in 1915 and became a ruin in the bombing. The work was created by accumulating 1000 still pictures like a frame-by-frame animation. Placing the dome (since this is a hemisphere, it can be identified as it is from any direction) in the center of the picture, the change of the surrounding area, a drama of the process of its construction, destruction, and reconstruction is presented. The dome, which plays the main role in this work, transforms being related to the surrounding area into a life of its own. The theme has been adopted many times in the past and could fall into clichés, but director Périot says, “By continuing to create work, we can give to it a new point of view and draw emotion from the audience,” and stresses how important it is to keep sending a message for nuclear disarmament. Today, in trials where many documentaries and arts are crossing to seek what media arts can do now, this work is calm but creates a deep impression.
What has lead you to “create a work”?
Making movies is a way to confront myself with topics I don't understand, like violence or work for instance. Usually, my projects start with a question, a question that may come from a picture I saw, a book I read… a question that I need to think about.
What tools do you use the most at present?
Editing.
What do you place greatest value on in your work?
My work is quite abstract even if it is about specific events or historical facts. I think that this abstraction allows the audience to project itself in the movies I make, and thus to be moved by them.
What personal concept do you keep throughout your creative activities?
One important idea for me is the memory. I often use historical archives mostly movies or pictures. Each of them is like a testimony, a place of memory. I have to take care of this memory and to transmit it to the audience. Moreover, these archives usually represent people who are dead now. It is important to have a particular ethics regarding the making of new creations and be careful to respect those people who no longer exist.
When you create a work, in what way do you think of a presentation using technologies or media as a means to communicate?
I don't really thing about presentation when I create a new movie. Audience is far away from me when I am alone in front of my computer. First, I am only making movies for me, even if I enjoy that my movies are screened after…
Could you name a person, a work, or an event that you have been influenced by the most?
Probably Dziga Vertov, a Russian avant garde cinematographer. He thought cinema was the perfect media to link technique and subject, vision and politic.
What kind of work would you like to create in the future?
My dream is to direct a feature fiction film based on the book of Abe Kobo named " The Box man " in English, "hako otoko" in Japanese.
What is the meaning or importance of “to create” for you?
Difficult question. Perhaps, it is my own way to resist, to make me feel alive, in a world I don't understand.










