Ito is one of Japan's most important experimental filmmakers. He graduated from the Art and Technology Department of the Kyushu Institute of Design in 1983, during which he made his debut with the film Spacy in 1981, shot in 16mm. He is a premature virtuous who works in a very metonymic and metaphorical way, even with some irony. He explores techniques such as time lapse and long exposure, and the rhythm he proposes is indeed functional in space, thus forming an essential part.
Ito's cinematic style and interest in experimental film were influenced by his mentor Toshio Matsumoto, with whom he apprenticed while a student at the Kyushu Institute of Design.
In his avant-garde creation, he has mainly been involved in producing short films. In 1982 he made Box, his second best-known short film. It deals with the idea of enclosing a space in a box; more properly speaking, an open space, a wide and long cityscape. It explores the operation of containing the large in the small and rotating its dimensions.
Over the course of his career, he has directed more than 20 short films, some of which have been screened at film festivals such as Rotterdam and EMAF Osnabrück, and as part of retrospective exhibitions of Ito's filmography at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the British Museum, among others.
‘The film is able to present an unreal world as a vivid reality and create a strange media space. My main intention is to change the usual scenes of everyday life and draw the audience (myself) into a vortex of supernatural illusion by exercising the magic of films’.
