The Contestant

The Contestant (2023) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. In late-1990s Japan, an aspiring comedian known as Nasubi was shut inside a bare apartment — stripped of clothes, food and contact with anyone. The deal: survive on whatever prizes he could win through magazine sweepstakes, and nothing else.

What he didn't know was that the cameras never stopped. A prime-time variety show turned his solitary ordeal into a weekly spectacle, and roughly fifteen million people tuned in to watch a young man starve and slowly come apart in isolation. Fifteen months passed this way before he grasped that the whole country had been watching.

Director Clair Titley pieces it together from the original broadcast tapes and a frank sit-down with Nasubi himself, who lays out what the experience did to him long after the room was emptied. The result is less a true-crime curiosity than a hard look at how television will grind down a real person for ratings — years before reality TV became ordinary. Ninety-one minutes that recolor the whole genre. Stream The Contestant (2023) online on iFILM.