He Endured Starvation & Humiliation, All For A Reality TV Show: TIFF Set For World Premiere Of ‘The Contestant’

deadline.com:

The Contestant, making its world premiere on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, begins with this text on screen: “At the end of the 20th century, Japanese audiences were confronted with an extraordinary television event.” The event in question was the premiere of a reality TV series with an “entertaining” but ultimately cruel premise: Place a game show contestant in an extreme situation and watch what happens.

An aspiring comedian nicknamed Nasubi (the Japanese word for eggplant) won an audition to be the centerpiece of the show.  “The setup was they put him in this apartment with nothing in the room apart from a pile of magazines… and a pile of postcards,” director Clair Titley explains. “They make him take off all his clothes and he has to win everything that he needs to survive through the competitions in the backs of magazines.”  That’s where the postcards came in – Nasubi needed to fill them out and mail them in hopes of winning prizes.  “He was told that he would be released once he’d won 1 million Yen’s worth of prizes [about $10,000 at the time],” Titley tells Deadline. “And then they shut the door and that’s it.

And it’s a total of 15 months that he’s in there.” Nasubi managed to “win” a lot of things that proved useless under the circumstances – like a set of tires.  “He applies to win clothes numerous times,” Titley says. “He wins some women’s panties that don’t fit him.” Denpa Shōnen – My Life in Prizes, as the show was called, was produced by a man named Toshio Tsuchiya.

In the documentary he admits, “We [were] trying to show the most basic primitive form of human being.” The producer had only informed Nasubi the show might air at a future date.  “They told me it was a pilot,” Nasubi