Mienai (1999)

One day, while wondering what kind of film he should be making, Go Riju befriends the driver of a newspaper-delivery truck. The man is rather recalcitrant, a bit of a loner, but Riju pressures him into agreeing to become the subject of a documentary. Sadly, nothing very illuminating comes of their encounters, and the man resists Riju's attempts to get him to read books and discuss them. Eventually he tells Riju to get lost, and Riju turns in despair to the man's next-door neighbour, a student who is apparently having trouble with his studies - You can't tell whether it's by accident or design while you're watching it (things become clearer once it's over), but Blind Alley adds up to a remarkably clear account of student-worker relationships in the 1980s. By making his own uncertainties the starting point for his film, and by measuring them against a stranger to whom they mean little or nothing, Riju in effect dramatises the impotence of many post-political intellectuals as the old Marxist dreams of revolution died their natural death. This is what it's like to grope for something to believe in at 24 frames-per-second.