“Half of my brain has been replaced and I am a machine.” – BitcoinBlog.de – the blog for Bitcoin and other virtual currencies

Famous Japanese horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is releasing a new film called Chime – and you can only watch it with an NFT.

The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is internationally known for his sophisticated horror films – such as “Cure”, “Pulse”, “Loft”, “Atonement” and others. His films are considered innovative and artistic, as a bridge between horror and art. Kurosawa refuses to resolve the films rationally, even according to the logic of horror.

His latest film, “Chime”, premiered at the Berlinale in February. It is about a cooking student who hears a chime in his head and claims that part of his brain has been replaced by a machine. He tries to prove this to his teacher using drastic means.

The film, Kurosawa explains, is intended to “shock the viewer and leave him with a strong sense of fear. Nothing that is necessary in normal stories is explained, and it does not fit into genres such as horror. That is the goal of this work: a crazy film, a film that is not of this world.”

The most important thing for us, however, is that you can’t watch “Chime” in theaters, on Netflix, Disney or Amazon – but only on Roadstead, a Japanese “DVT” platform. DVT stands for “Digital Video Trading”: Roadstead wants to “treat video works not as ephemeral content to be consumed, but as assets worth collecting.”

Videos on Roadstead are tokenized as NFTs on the Flow (FLOW) blockchain. Each video is unique thanks to a serial number, and users can not only watch and enjoy the works, but also collect, trade or gift them – just like in the good old semi-digital era of CDs and VHS tapes.

Chime is the first and so far only film on Roadstead. The procedure is relatively conventional: to buy, borrow or rent a film, you have to pay yen via bank transfer.

I registered an account as a test in the hope that the platform would live up to its promise of bringing the Web3 user experience to video trading. However, I found it rather complicated and cumbersome to use. It is much easier to trade large amounts on Uniswap than to watch a movie on Roadstead.

Chime is not the first film to experiment with NFTs. In 2021, the makers of the series “Stoner Cats” – a cartoon about stoned cats – financed the production with NFTs. However, this led to a lawsuit by the SEC last year, which accused the producers of earning eight million dollars through the unlicensed sale of a security.

One can only hope that Kurosawa fares better with “Chima” and that Roadstead manages to exploit the potential that NFTs could have for the film industry, especially for films outside of blockbusters.