How do you make films in one of which the main character spends most of the time inside a box that conceals all but a slit for his eyes, and has an opening so he can walk, and in the other no words are spoken and all oral communication is by grunts and hoots?

The answers have been forthcoming at the 74^th Berlinale festival where the Japanese-made “Hako Otoko” (The Box Man), based on a 1973 novel by Kōbō Abe, is screening out of competition and the U.S. independent film “Sasquatch Sunset”, a mockumentary about the last four Bigfoots wandering through a forest in the Pacific Northwest, is being shown following its Sundance premiere.

Gakuryu Ishii, the director of “The Box Man”, told the Variety trade publication recently that the film was 32 years in the making, at first for lack of financing and later for struggling over how to adapt it to the screen.

“The film is taken from a 1973 novel, but I didn’t want to do a nostalgia piece,” Ishii said. “I wanted to set the story in the present and strengthen the main female character. I thought I had to pay attention to those two points. Otherwise, there would be no reason to make the film.”

“The Box Man”, while funny in many places, is intellectually challenging. It asks why someone would withdraw from society to live inside a box, and looks at how people react. It also comes with a health warning, repeated many times in the course of the film’s two-hour running time: “Those who obsess over the Box Man become the Box Man”.

This is the fate that has befallen a photographer who goes by the name Myself (Masatoshi Nagase), who pursued the original Box Man all over Tokyo to snap photos of him. One day the empty box shows up in Myself’s tiny back yard and before long he is drawn to experiment with it, and becomes the Box Man.

For a time, Myself as Box Man is pursued simultaneously by a gunman and a Samurai swordsman, both wanting to kill him for reasons unknown. He eludes them but falls instead into a trap set by a former war doctor called “the General” (Koichi Sato) who runs a private hospital and wants two things in what little time he has left to live, having contracted a fatal disease in Africa: to have sex with his young nurse (Ayana Shiramoto) and to get his hands on Box Man’s box. The General has a doctor assistant (Tadanobu Asano) who ostensibly is helping him to get the box but actually is planning to kill the general, steal his money and get away with “the perfect murder”.

In the course of the movie we discover that Myself has been keeping a running journal of everything he sees and does as Box Man. He also has used his vantage point of looking at the world through a slit at peoples’ waist level to shoot lots of pictures of women from the waist down, and so has become a peeping Tom, or like someone who consumes pornographic images over the Internet.

“I feel that we’re all box men now,” Ishii told Variety. “Abe’s novel was a prophetic book that anticipated the information society of today. That’s where Abe’s genius lies. That’s why I wanted to set the film in the present.”

“Sasquatch Sunset”, directed and written by brothers David and Nathan Zellner, features Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, disguised under tons of makeup, as members of a lonely foursome of Bigfoots facing imminent extinction. Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner make up the rest of the Sasquatch family which roams the forest searching for food, shelter — and other Sasquatch.

The Berlinale programme lists the film as being “without dialogue” but that’s a matter of viewpoint. These Sasquatch are very effective at communicating when they jump up and down and hoot in fear or they call over long distances with high pitched cries. They also try to rouse other Sasquatch from the mountains or valleys with rhythmically timed drumming on tree trunks, but there is never a response.

What some of them are not good at is surviving, one of them challenging a mountain lion to a fight he was bound to lose and another rolling off and under a cut log floating in a river, and drowning.

There’s a reason Bigfoots are extinct, or more likely never existed, but the Zellners’ oddball film is an entertaining way to watch them fade over the horizon..

By Michael Roddy