When Yosuke Fujita's debut feature "Zenzen Daijobu (Fine, Totally Fine)" started making the international festival rounds in 2008, it charmed nearly everyone who saw it.
This laugh-until-you-hurt comedy about two outsider pals in pursuit of the same socially awkward girl won the Nippon Cinema Award at the Nippon Connection Film Festival in Frankfurt, the largest international showcase of Japanese films, as well as audience prizes at the New York Asian Film Festival and the Udine Far East Film Festival. Third Window Films of the U.K. later released an English-subtitled DVD with a cover blurb from the Daily Express comparing the film to the work of Aki Kaurismaki and Jim Jarmusch.
Born in 1963, Fujita had already spent nearly two decades learning his trade — beginning with his 1986 debut film "Tora," which won the grand prize in the 8 mm division of the Torino Film Festival — by the time he made "Fine, Totally Fine." Instead of following his early successes with more and bigger films, Fujita ended up making stage performance videos and collaborating on other projects with Otona Keikaku, a theater troupe founded by comic actor, scriptwriter and director Suzuki Matsuo. Among his fellow troupe members and boon companions was Kankuro Kudo, a scriptwriting wunderkind who also found success as an actor and director, though his frantic, raucous style of comedy is the polar opposite of Fujita's low-key, deadpan approach.