Kamikaze Hearts

[MichaelB]

Full specs announced:

KAMIKAZE HEARTS
A film by Juliet Bashore

BFI Blu-ray release on 27 March 2023

See the trailer here.

Alternately instructive, distressing, contestable and fascinating, Juliet Bashore’s quasi-documentary KAMIKAZE HEARTS (1986) plunges into the adult entertainment industry of the 1980s and takes an unsparing look at misogyny, drug abuse and exploitation via the story of two women – naive newcomer Tigr and her partner, the magnetic, imperious adult entertainment veteran Sharon Mitchell – caught in a toxic romance.

Newly restored by Kino Lorber and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the film was screened at the BFI London Film Festival 2022 and now comes to BFI Blu-ray with extras including an audio commentary and a selection of newly recorded interviews.

By turns mesmerising and unsettling, KAMIKAZE HEARTS is both a fascinating record of pre-gentrification San Francisco’s X-rated underground and an intense, searing love story that offers a disturbing glimpse of the commodification of bodies, feelings and lives.

Special features
• Restored in 2K from the original camera negative by Kino Lorber and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
• Audio commentary by director Juliet Bashore, actors Sharon Mitchell, Jon Martin and Howie Gordon (aka Richard Pacheco), and performance artist Shelly Mars
• Crash (excerpt, 1994, 12 mins): Juliet Bashore workshopped a ‘fictional’ version of Kamikaze Hearts through the American Film Institute. This sketch is one of the outcomes of the AFI project
• Interviews (2022, 173 mins): a selection of newly recorded interviews totalling almost three hours, with Juliet Bashore, Sharon Mitchell, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, plus Susie Bright, Howie Gordon and Jon Martin
• Vintage trailer
• 2022 trailer
• ***First pressing only*** illustrated booklet with a new Director’s Statement by Juliet Bashore, new writing by artist, curator and co-founder of Club des Femmes Sarah Wood and extracts from a 1990 interview with Juliet Bashore; credits and notes on the special features

Product details
RRP: £19.99 / Cat. no. BFIB1482 / 18
USA / 1986 / colour / 77 minutes / English language with optional subtitles for the Deaf and partial hearing / aspect ratio 1.33:1 // BD50: 1080p, 24fps, PCM 2.0 mono audio (48kHz/24-bit)

[beamish14]

I genuinely don’t know if I’m more giddy about this or Weekender. Outstanding work, BFI