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Festival 2026
Mari Terashima: Exquisite Tastes


Curated by
Mia Parnall
Running time
105 mins

Violent tendencies and good table manners are never far apart in the films of Mari Terashima. Her work often plays on the double meaning of “taste”— both a marker of refinement and class, and a violent expression of the desire to consume. From a bloodthirsty toy dog with a penchant for fine dining, to a troupe of self-mutilating, tea party-hosting aristocrats, the films in this collection, made between 1986 and 2009, combine eccentric characters with imagery at once abject and delicious. A key cinematic voice from Japan’s subcultural underground, Terashima explores our postmodern appetites and their fine distinctions between propriety and the vulgar.


Tickets


6 May 2026, 6:15 PM
Past Event
Barbican Centre 
Je t’aime
1986
Directed by
Mari Terashima
Running time
8 mins
The aesthetics of cheap romance take on a morbid character in this ero-guro video work. Electromagnetic visuals are intercut with images of partially dissected corpses, accompanied by Psychic TV’s cover of Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin’s “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus.”

Her Majesty the Queen’s Polyester Dog
1994
Directed by
Mari Terashima
Running time
37 mins
A young teacher rescues a lost toy dog, formerly owned by the Queen of England. The animal comes to have an increasingly powerful influence on the man’s life, infecting him with its tastes for fine dining, British mod culture, and bloody violence. A collage of iconography combines puppetry, mixed-media storytelling, ...

Alice in the Underworld: The Dark Märchen Show!!
2009
Directed by
Mari Terashima
Running time
60 mins
Set in an ambiguous world of gothic fantasy, this adaptation of Alice in Wonderland stars the "emo-butoh" performance troupe Rose de Reficul et Guiggles. Terashima teases out the psychological unsettlement of Lewis Carroll's original story, drawing on the aesthetics of early cinema and the history of underground perfor...

Curator bio



Mia Parnall is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California researching themes of worlding in Japanese independent film and media art. Since 2023, she has curated the online programs at Collaborative Cataloging Japan, a research and preservation initiative focusing on Japanese experimental film from 1950-1980.

Many of Mari Terashima’s works are available to watch in the CCJ Viewing Library, an initiative begun by Collaborative Cataloging Japan to improve access to experimental Japanese moving image works for institutions and individual researchers. Find out more about the platform at collabjapan.org.

Additional info



Content note: contains depictions of dead bodies, medical images