Documentary focuses on man behind a cruelly bizarre 1990s Japanese reality show

TOKYO (AP) — Naked and frail, a shaggy-haired man films himself as he endures solitude in a tiny room for months, and months more.

“The Contestant,” directed by Clair Titley, explores the story behind the late 1990s hit reality TV show from Japan, “A Life in Prizes,” in which a comedian nicknamed Nasubi is forced to survive on whatever he can redeem from mail-in coupons, as he is denied contact with the outside world.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 and will stream on Hulu from May 2.

Tomoaki Hamatsu — whose nickname “Nasubi,” meaning eggplant in Japanese, refers jokingly to his long chin — never manages to clothe himself and remains naked throughout the show. But he dances to celebrate the things he does obtain, especially food, even if it’s just a pot of kimchi.

Canada’s National Post, in a review of Titley’s documentary, described the TV show as “‘The Truman Show’ meets ‘OldBoy,’” referring to the 1998 American film starring Jim Carrey about a man who unwittingly stars in a reality TV show about his own life and the 2003 Cannes-winning Korean film about an imprisoned man.

The British director Titley said she chanced upon the reality show and reached out to Nasubi because she felt no one had ever told his side of the story.

“I felt that they were kind of dismissive and even derogatory to an extent about, you know, look at those crazy Japanese. And I really wanted to know Nasubi’s story. I really wanted to know what had happened to him, why he’d stayed in there,” she said in a recent Zoom interview with The Associated Press.

What makes her documentary more than a just-for-laughs, big-in-Japan satire are the interviews Titley conducts with Hamatsu’s mother, sister and friend, who