Ahead of Neo Sora’s Happyend closing the LA Festival of Movies, we present the director’s prequel short. Set in “near-future” Tokyo, Sugar Glass Bottle follows Yuta and Kou, two teenagers rehearsing a bottle-smashing prank with ultra-convincing props.

Both Happyend and Sugar Glass Bottle take place in a sci-fi future that bears an uncanny resemblance to the present. The setting has allowed Sora to underscore contemporary political trajectories, showing how surveillance strategies and authoritarian regimes once thought dystopic have become more prevalent. According to him, this “near-future” Japan has shown him how to “channel playfulness and anger as resistance against the encroaching forces of gentrification.”

“So much of who I am right now is in large part a result of my interactions with a really tight group of high school friends I used to hang out and play with. I just have a profound love of my friends; I think friendship is a beautiful thing that doesn’t abide by the same norms and rules that marriage or family must follow.” NEO SORA

The prank at the center of Sugar Glass Bottle was inspired by a similar jape orchestrated on Sora by his friends when he was a teenager. His fascination with pranks, jokes, and idle time not only reflect his interests as a filmmaker inspired by Taiwanese cinema (similar antics abound in films like The Boys from Fengkuei and Rebels of the Neon God), but also his political ideals as an artist searching for pockets of disruption and acts of resistance that counter the norms of contemporary capitalism.

Neo Sora grew up between New York and Tokyo. He studied Philosophy and Film Studies at Wesleyan University, and has since directed a series of films across genres. He is also a part of both artist collectives Lunch Bee House and Zakkubalan. Sora’s first fiction feature, Happyend, premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, followed by presentations at NYFF and TIFF. Metrograph Pictures is now set to release the film in June.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Micah Gottlieb and Neo Sora.