Combining two of Mariko’s celebrated Super-8 student films with a recent featurette, this program reveals the full range of the director’s fascination with antiheroes and the margins of society. With his autobiographically inflected shorts, Mariko’s 30 Pirates and The Far East Apartment, the then-student filmmaker first revealed his penchant for uncomfortable intimacy and awkwardly confrontational situations, here embodied in the figure of a young filmmaker and dreamer inventing alternate worlds on his university campus and in his cramped apartment. In Ninifuni, Mariko tells the story of a small-town young man seized by the impulse to rob a pachinko parlor, leading to a desperate chase and strange encounter with the J-Pop idol band Momoiro Clover Z.