About Midnight Eye

Midnight Eye is an entirely non-commercial, non-profit initiative created and maintained by:

  • Tom Mes - editor
  • Jasper Sharp - editor
  • Martin Mes - design and programming

Tom Mes (editor)

Tom Mes was born in Rotterdam, Holland, in 1974. As a film critic he has contributed to publications that include Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Rue Morgue, De Filmkrant, Kateigaho and many others. He has provided liner notes and audio commentaries for numerous DVD releases of Japanese films around the world. He also has a background in animation as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist.

Tom is the author of the critically praised books Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto and Re-Agitator: A Decade of Writing on Takashi Miike (all FAB Press). He co-authored The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (Stone Bridge Press) with Jasper Sharp and Tokyolife: Art and Design (Rizzoli International) with Jasper Sharp and Ian Luna. Tom also contributed to books on Japanese and Asian cinema in the UK, France, Italy, Croatia, and Japan.

He is the translator of The Cinema and the Shoah (SUNY Press, co-translated with Anna Harrison), edited by Jean-Michel Frodon, and Night and Fog: A Film in History (University of Minnesote Press) by Sylvie Lindeperg. As a screenwriter Tom worked on Shinji Imaoka's pink musical Underwater Love (Onna no Kappa) and as an actor he can be seen in Kiki Sugino's Taksu (Yokudo).

Jasper Sharp (editor)

Jasper Sharp was born in 1971 and raised in the rural idyll of Devon, England, though has subsequently gone on to live in Montreal, Amsterdam, Finland, and Tokyo and has traveled extensively over four different continents. As well as curating the Japanese program of London's Raindance Film Festival, his writings on film have appeared in publications all over the world, from the US to Russia to Taiwan, including Variety, SFX, Film International and 3d World. He has also worked as a computer programmer on the Douglas Adams game Starship Titanic, and as a video editor for a UK shopping channel, where his featurette on a non-stick frying pan dazzled housewives across the nation.

Jasper Sharp is the author of Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema (FAB Press) and the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (Scarecrow Press), as well as co-author, with Tom Mes, of The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (Stone Bridge Press). He is currently based in London where he runs Zipangu Fest, a festival dedicated to Japanese film. Jasper also co-directed, with Tim Grabham, the feature film The Creeping Garden.

Martin Mes (design and programming)

Martin Mes was born in Rotterdam, Holland, in 1971. He is a freelance graphic designer and interface designer. In addition to numerous web-based projects, he designed the book Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike (FAB Press).

Martin is based in Rotterdam, Holland. His website can be found at: http://www.martinmes.net.

With contributions from: