Watch Peep TV Show

Winner of the Rotterdam Film Festival's International Critic's Prize, PEEP 'TV' SHOW rages forth from Japan's dizzying Shibuya underground like a Dostoyevskian screed for the 21st century, where hidden webcams, lost youth, televisual violence and girls dressed as goth Lolitas merge to embrace (or annihilate) the voyeurism of contemporary culture. Two street kids, the nihilistic Hasegawa (looking like a missing member of the Ramones) and the suicidal Moe (with an appearance similar to a punked-out Alice in Wonderland) set-up an Internet site that begins by posting 9/11 footage, then branches out to include spy-cam shots, animal deaths and necrophilia. Turning viewers into the viewed (and vice versa), their "peep TV" site becomes a mass movement, a space for those seeking "reality" or seeking to avoid it. "We have been robbed of our own reality," director Yutaka Tsuchiya writes. "Are you a spectator of the rerun or are you a member of the cast? Or are you really here at all?"