Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

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    Chie Hayakawa Imagines a Japan Where the Elderly Volunteer to Die

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    The premise for Chie Hayakawa’s film, “Plan 75,” is shocking: a government push to euthanize the elderly. In a rapidly aging society, some also wonder: Is the movie prescient?TOKYO — The Japanese film director Chie Hayakawa was germinating the idea for a screenplay when she decided to test out her premise on elderly friends of her mother and other acquaintances. Her question: If the government sponsored a euthanasia program for people 75 and over, would you consent to it?“Most people were very positive about it,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “They didn’t want to be a burden on other people or their children.”To Ms. Hayakawa, the seemingly shocking response was a powerful reflection of Japan’s culture and demographics. In her first feature-length film, “Plan 75,” which won a special distinction at the Cannes Film Festival this month, the government of a near-future Japan promotes quiet institutionalized deaths and group burials for lonely older people, with cheerful salespeople pitching them on the idea as if hawking travel insurance.“The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,” Ms. Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo before the film’s opening in Japan on Friday. Following the rules and not imposing on others, she said, are cultural imperatives “that make sure you don’t stick out in a group setting.”With a lyrical, understated touch, Ms. Hayakawa has taken on one of the biggest elephants in the room in Japan: the challenges of dealing with the world’s oldest society.Ms. Hayakawa with other winners at the Cannes Film Festival last month.Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesClose to one-third of the country’s population is 65 or older, and Japan has more centenarians per capita than any other nation. One out of five people over 65 in Japan live alone, and the country has the highest proportion of people suffering from dementia. With a rapidly declining population, the government faces potential pension shortfalls and questions about how the nation will care for its longest-living citizens.Aging politicians dominate government, and the Japanese media emphasizes rosy stories about happily aging fashion gurus or retail accommodations for older customers. But for Ms. Hayakawa, it was not a stretch to imagine a world in which the oldest citizens would be cast aside in a bureaucratic process — a strain of thought she said could already be found in Japan.Euthanasia is illegal in the country, but it occasionally arises in grisly criminal contexts. In 2016, a man killed 19 people in their sleep at a center for people with disabilities outside Tokyo, claiming that such people should be euthanized because they “have extreme difficulty living at home or being active in society.”The horrifying incident provided a seed of an idea for Ms. Hayakawa. “I don’t think that was an isolated incident or thought process within Japanese society,” she said. “It was already floating around. I was very afraid that Japan was turning into a very intolerant society.”To Kaori Shoji, who has written about film and the arts for The Japan Times and the BBC and saw an earlier version of “Plan 75,” the movie did not seem dystopian. “She’s just telling it like it is,” Ms. Shoji said. “She’s telling us: ‘This is where we’re headed, actually.’”That potential future is all the more believable in a society where some people are driven to death by overwork, said Yasunori Ando, an associate professor at Tottori University who studies spirituality and bioethics.“It is not impossible to think of a place where euthanasia is accepted,” he said.Chieko Baisho plays an elderly woman in “Plan 75.”Loaded FilmsMs. Hayakawa has spent the bulk of her adult years contemplating the end of life from a very personal vantage. When she was 10, she learned that her father had cancer, and he died a decade later. “That was during my formative years, so I think it had an influence on my perspective toward art,” she said.The daughter of civil servants, Ms. Hayakawa started drawing her own picture books and writing poems from a young age. In elementary school, she fell in love with “Muddy River,” a Japanese drama about a poor family living on a river barge. The movie, directed by Kohei Oguri, was nominated for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards in 1982.“The feelings I couldn’t put into words were expressed in that movie,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “And I thought, I want to make movies like that as well.”She eventually applied to the film program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, believing that she would get a better grounding in moviemaking in the United States. But given her modest English abilities, she decided within a week of arriving on campus to switch to the photography department, because she figured she could take pictures by herself.Her instructors were struck by her curiosity and work ethic. “If I mentioned a film offhandedly, she would go home and go rent it, and if I mentioned an artist or exhibition, she would go research it and have something to say about it,” said Tim Maul, a photographer and one of Ms. Hayakawa’s mentors. “Chie was someone who really had momentum and a singular drive.”After graduating in 2001, Ms. Hayakawa gave birth to her two children in New York. In 2008, she and her husband, the painter Katsumi Hayakawa, decided to return to Tokyo, where she began working at WOWOW, a satellite broadcaster, helping to prepare American films for Japanese viewing.“The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,” Ms. Hayakawa said.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesAt 36, she enrolled in a one-year film program at a night school in Tokyo while continuing to work during the day. “I felt like I couldn’t put my full energy into child raising or filmmaking,” she said. Looking back, she said, “I would tell myself it’s OK, just enjoy raising your children. You can start filmmaking at a later time.”For her final project, she made “Niagara,” about a young woman who learns, as she is about to depart the orphanage where she grew up, that her grandfather had killed her parents, and that her grandmother, who she thought had died in a car accident with her parents, was alive.She submitted the movie to the Cannes Film Festival in a category for student works and was shocked when it was selected for screening in 2014. At the festival, Ms. Hayakawa met Eiko Mizuno-Gray, a film publicist, who subsequently invited Ms. Hayakawa to make a short film on the theme of Japan 10 years in the future. It would be part of an anthology produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the celebrated Japanese director.Ms. Hayakawa had already been developing the idea of “Plan 75” as a feature-length film but decided to make an abridged version for “Ten Years Japan.”While writing the script, she woke up every morning at 4 to watch movies. She cites the Taiwanese director Edward Yang, the South Korean director Lee Chang-dong and Krzysztof Kieslowski, the Polish art-house director, as important influences. After work, she would write for a couple of hours at a cafe while her husband cared for their children — relatively rare in Japan, where women still carry the disproportionate burden of housework and child care.After Ms. Hayakawa’s 18-minute contribution to the anthology came out, Ms. Mizuno-Gray and her husband, Jason Gray, worked with her to develop an extended script. By the time filming started, it was the middle of the pandemic. “There were countries with Covid where they were not prioritizing the life of the elderly,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “Reality surpassed fiction in a way.”Ms. Hayakawa at Cannes with two actors in “Plan 75,” Hayato Isomura, left, and Stefanie Arianne, who plays Maria.John Phillips/Getty ImagesMs. Hayakawa decided to adopt a subtler tone for the feature-length movie and inject more of a sense of hope. She also added several narrative strands, including one about an elderly woman and her tightknit group of friends, and another about a Filipina caregiver who takes a job at one of the euthanasia centers.She included scenes of the Filipino community in Japan, Ms. Hayakawa said, as a contrast to the dominant culture. “Their culture is that if somebody is in trouble, you help them right away,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “I think that is something Japan is losing.”Stefanie Arianne, the daughter of a Japanese father and a Filipina mother who plays Maria, the caregiver, said Ms. Hayakawa had urged her to show emotional restraint. In one scene, Ms. Arianne said, she had the instinct to shed tears, “but with Chie, she really challenged me to not cry.”Ms. Hayakawa said she did not want to make a film that simply deemed euthanasia right or wrong. “I think what kind of end to a life and what kind of death you want is a very personal decision,” she said. “I don’t think it’s something that is so black or white.”Hikari Hida More

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      in Theater

      The Moment of Death, Live Onstage

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      The Swiss provocateur Milo Rau’s latest work explores the ethics of voluntary euthanasia with real footage of an assisted suicide.DOUAI, France — A serene woman greets the audience at “Grief & Beauty,” the Swiss theater director Milo Rau’s latest production. As spectators take their seats, she appears on a video screen above the stage, silent, in a red sweater and black-rimmed glasses. Then, minutes into the show, we learn that Johanna, as she is identified, died on Aug. 28 — by choice and in Belgium, where euthanasia is legal.Real footage of Johanna’s death is the macabre centerpiece of “Grief & Beauty,” the second installment in Rau’s “Trilogy of Private Life.” The first, “Familie,” recreated a family’s real-life collective suicide in eerie detail. Like “Familie,” “Grief & Beauty” had its premiere in Ghent, Belgium, where Rau is the artistic director of the NTGent theater. This month, the show traveled to Le Tandem, a playhouse in the northern French city of Douai. Further tour dates are scheduled in France and the Netherlands.“Grief & Beauty” flirts even more closely with the choice to die than “Familie.” Instead of turning the subject matter into a drama, Rau actually shows us the moment a lethal injection killed Johanna. Yet while she is the heart of “Grief & Beauty,” the production barely scratches the surface of her life.Voluntary euthanasia, which is legal in only a handful of countries, has become a subject of fascination for Europe’s experimental theatermakers in recent years. In 2018, the Belgian choreographer Alain Platel also filmed a dying woman and played the footage throughout his 100-minute work “Requiem for L.” The next year, Marcos Ariel Hourmann, a doctor convicted of practicing euthanasia in Spain, where it is illegal, put on an interactive show in which he asked the audience members to judge him.“Grief & Beauty,” like Platel’s production, was created with the consent of everyone involved, and Rau details in an interview in the program the research that went into the production. His team, including the four actors onstage, met with health care workers and bereaved relatives, as well as patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Some of them also visited Johanna last summer, we are told during the show.Princess Isatu Hassan Bangura, who was born in Sierra Leone, in “Grief & Beauty.”Michiel DevijverYet for most of it, Johanna takes a back seat to the actors’ stories. Instead of zeroing in on euthanasia, Rau assembled a motley cast of professionals and amateurs who have all experienced grief, albeit in different ways. Arne de Tremerie talks eloquently about his mother’s multiple sclerosis; Staf Smans, the oldest cast member, recounts the deaths of his sister, mother and daughter in quick succession. Princess Isatu Hassan Bangura, who was born in Sierra Leone, touches on another kind of pain —— that of being exiled and losing, as she puts it, her “African side.”Each of these performers speaks either directly to the auditorium or to a camera positioned to the right of the stage, which relays their monologues on the screen above. In keeping with Rau’s habit of mixing reality with semi-fictional scenes, they then perform vignettes set in an apartment. A kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom are visible; at one point, an actor mentions that several items in the décor, including a handmade quilt, belonged to Johanna.Here and there, the script returns to her life. We learn that she witnessed the bombing of Rotterdam in the Netherlands during World War II, when she was 4; that she loved classical music; and that she once performed as a singer at NTGent. Out of the hours members of Rau’s team spent with her, it’s not much. Instead, she hovers mostly silently above “Grief & Beauty,” her eyes and expression alive and sympathetic.Before her death is shown, Johanna speaks briefly. “I always said I would go with a smile,” she says, before adding: “I have a lot of sleep to catch up on.” The injection follows.We watch as one of her eyes closes involuntarily, and her breathing becomes halted. In Douai, some around me cried openly. (Euthanasia is illegal in France, but according to an April survey by IFOP, one of the country’s leading polling organizations, 93 percent of French people support it in cases of terminal illness.)“Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas,” which opens “Grief & Beauty,” returns at this moment, along with more personal anecdotes from the cast. Yet no matter how hard Rau tries to interweave their stories with Johanna’s, her presence is overpowering. She belonged in a production of her own.Death has also long haunted the repertoire of the French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. This fall, audiences in France have a chance to revisit those works: The Festival d’Automne à Paris, a prestigious annual event taking place across numerous venues in the French capital, is devoting a retrospective to Vienne. Her latest production, “The Pond,” was presented at the Théâtre Paris-Villette in September, and revivals of several older works are scheduled before the end of the year.“Kindertotenlieder,” created by the French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Mathilde Darel“Kindertotenlieder,” created in 2007, returned this month for four performances at the Centre Pompidou with a new cast — that is, a new human cast, since the stage is mostly populated with highly realistic dolls and robots. When “Kindertotenlieder” starts, it’s difficult to gauge just how many of the hunched-over teenagers in the darkened, snow-covered space are real.When the five actors do move and speak, “Kindertotenlieder” is no less disquieting. Although there is no linear story, the murder of a teenager by one of his peers gives a starting point. When the murdered boy’s ghost, the killer and others talk, it’s often to themselves, and the American writer Dennis Cooper’s text for the production is as chilling as it is over-the-top. (Sample line: “When I grow up, I want to behead your wife and kids.”)While the play’s title, which means “Songs on the Death of Children,” is borrowed from a song cycle by Gustav Mahler, the live music — introduced as a “memorial concert” for the dead boy — is by the duo KTL. To their moody, emo-adjacent songs, slow, violent interactions play out: A doll is strangled; two men kiss before one shoves the other, viciously.In “Kindertotenlieder,” as in “Grief & Beauty,” death is at the fingertips of the living. Neither production is for the faint of heart, but compared with the relentless angst of Vienne’s teenagers, there is relief in watching Johanna say her peaceful goodbye in “Grief & Beauty.” From time to time, reality still manages to be more soothing than fiction. More