Happy Retirement

Shintaro, an Assistant Bank Division Chief at the Financial Services Agency, had been working like a dog for 33 years. But just five years before he is due for retirement, his boss framed him for accepting bribes. Shintaro was forced to retire immediately and was parachuted into a public organization, JAMS (Japan Association of Medium and Small Enterprises). Instead of a happy retirement that he had dreamt of, his out-of-the-blue retirement triggers a complete family breakup. To everyone’s surprise, his job is “to do nothing” for an annual salary of ten million yen!

(In)Voluntary Retirements

On July 2nd, 2008, at five thirty in the afternoon, a 53-year-old man called Jean-Michel was run over by a train in Saint-Lyé, a town with a population of 3,000 located in the east of France. No one knew whether it was a suicide or an accident. The director investigates around the town, asks different inhabitants what they think of that tragedy. For many people, Jean-Michel had killed himself, after amassing too many worries and problems; the more the voiceover asks, the more mysterious it all gets. But there is a detail from Jean-Michel’s life that connects him to Argentina—he had been an employee at a phone company until a privatization left him without a job. (In)Voluntary Retirements is a documentary that shows how the kinship between Argentina’s politics in the ‘90s and France’s twenty years later damaged the lives of so many people.

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A Dull Razor

This picture shows an old gentleman seated at his shaving table. The razor is evidently giving him a great deal of trouble...