Sion Sono

Sion Sono (園 子温) is a Japanese filmmaker, author, and poet.

Sion Sono was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1961.

As he mentioned in many interviews, at the age of 17 he ran away from home and wandered the streets on the verge of starvation.

On his first night in Tokyo, he met a woman who lured Sono into a hotel room where she put a knife to her own throat and threatened to commit suicide if he would not help her meet her parents pretending to be her husband.

Sono not only agreed but spent several weeks with her family in the countryside, but in the end the woman let him go and gave him a small amount of money.

Soon, he began starving again.

Then he met a priest from the Unification Church and agreed to join their cult because the priest promised Sono food and shelter.

Sono spent some time in the cult but found it extremely funny how the main priest claimed to be God.

Soon, Sono fled.

Even though the cult was not yet as mighty and powerful as it is nowadays, it strictly prohibited its members to return into normal life and was not easy to get away from.

The cultists tracked and followed the runaway.

When Sono returned home, he found a letter from the cult on his table.

To save himself from the cult, Sono decided to join the terrorist group that was protesting against expansion of the Narita International Airport.

Almost everyday their protests grew into fights with the riot police so they were happy to take in one more young and strong soldier.

Eventually, Sono managed to leave the terrorist group, and the cult members never showed up again.

Upon returning home, Sono entered Hosei University.

During his student years he tried himself as a poet and even was published in magazines Eureka and The Modern Poem Book.

Then he also started taking his first steps in film directing, making a series of short films on Super 8.

In 1985, Sono's short film Ore wa Sono Sion da!!, in which he introduced himself as a punk poet, was selected for the Pia Film Festival.

Two years later, in 1987 Sono won the PFF Gran Prix with his film Otoko no Hanamichi (A Man's flower road).

The PFF scholarship he spent to create the next movie, his first feature-length 16 mm film Bicycle Sighs (Jitensha Toiki), a coming-of-age tale about two underachievers in perfectionist Japan.

Sono co-wrote, directed, and starred in the film.

In 1990, Sono moved to San Francisco, and was admitted to University of California, Berkeley; however, he never attended class, or learned English, instead spending his time watching B-movies and porno movies.

Soon he dropped his studies and moved to San Francisco, in his own words, ‘to study movies’.

Even though he managed to enter the Berkeley University, he did not learn English or attend lectures.

Instead, he spent all the time watching B and C-rate movies.

As he explained in interviews, he wanted to ‘clear his head from classic cinema’.

Upon return to Japan, he ventured into the creation of unconventional, ‘dark entertainment’ art-house.

In Japan, he wrote and directed his second feature film, The Room (Heya) (1992), a bizarre tale about a serial killer looking for a room in a bleak, doomed Tokyo district.

It participated in the Sundance Film Festival.

The Room also toured on 49 festivals worldwide, including the Berlin Film Festival and the Rotterdam Film Festival.

In 1993-1995, Sono's main project was an art-group named Tokyo GAGAGA.

Armed only with their creative ideas and art, group members ‘led a guerilla war against normalization of solitude and loneliness in everyday life’.

They seized the busiest streets of Tokyo and filled them with installations and banners.

In the following years, Sono directed works such as the drama I Am Keiko (1997), the faux-documentary Utsushimi (2000), and the pink film Teachers of Sexual Play: Modelling Vessels with the Female Body (2000).

Also in 2000, Sono released an experimental short film 0cm4, contemplating on colourblindness and epistemology.

In 2001, Sono wrote and directed the horror film Suicide Club, his breakthrough feature, which follows a series of interconnected mass suicides.

The film was very successful, gaining considerable notoriety in film festivals (including winning the Prize for "Most Ground-Breaking Film" at the 2003 Fantasia Film Festival), and developing a significant cult following over the years, even spawning a manga adaptation, as well as a companion piece novel written by Sono himself.

In 2005, Sono released Noriko's Dinner Table, a prequel to Suicide Club, which also received acclaim.

Best known on the festival circuit for the film Love Exposure (2008), he has been called "the most subversive filmmaker working in Japanese cinema today", a "stakhanovist filmmaker" with an "idiosyncratic" career.