Mockumentaries have been the latest trend in Asian cinema in particular, with a number of directors presenting films that look like they are real, but are completely fictional. With the support of Housen Cultural Foundation, Yuichiro Sakashita presents his own work in the category, in a style though, that looks more like an advertising infomercial than a documentary, thus straying away from whatever norm the genre could even have.
Outsourcing is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival
HR Rep Miyagawa of JobLink Inc. is the presenter of the informercial, which focuses on promoting outsourcing of hiring new employees to a recruitment agency. The film intersperses his talk, with “testimonies” of the outsourcing company, and a number of potential employees, most of which are interviewed remotely due to Covid measures. Eventually, Miyagawa presents the people he hired as a testament to the success of outsourcing, but soon realizes that something is amiss.
Yuichiro Sakashita directs a hilarious short, which seems to mock a number of modern practices in the corporate environment, and particularly the HR sector. Evidently, the concept of outsourcing is the main focus of the jokes here, but the same applies to the distant communication, the tactics candidates for work implement, as the recipe for success in job interviews is a hot topic nowadays, and how companies still have to deal with politeness even with the strangest candidates, as in the case of Mr Okazaki.
Apart from context, the whole presentation of the movie is rather entertaining, with the succession of different scenes actually adding to the comedy in an excellent work in the editing department, while the whole infomercial aesthetics, with the intentionally polished cinematography and the names of the people on focus presented on screen for example, while occasionally uttering absurd things, also adds to this approach. Furthermore, the key presence of Sara Ogawa adds a reality show element, again in mockumentary style, along with a rather hilarious twist, with her and Tomoya Maeno as Miyagawa standing out with their performances.
The funniest scene however, comes when Miyagawa decides to confront the outsourcing company, with the two men holding the glass window being rather hilarious, in a rather smartly shot scene.
“Outsourcing” is a very entertaining, very intelligent short, that exemplifies the artistic and contextual value of the whole category of the mockumentary.
