Category: Japan

All the Songs We Never Sang (Chris Rudz, 2023)

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A young woman finds herself diving into the past after receiving a less than enthusiastic welcome on visiting her mother’s island home in Chris Rudz’s gentle indie drama, All the Songs We Never Sang. As the title implies, the film is as much about time wasted in bitterness as it is about the surreality of life on a small island where pearl diving is still a dominant force in the local economy.

17-year-old Natsumi (Miru Nagase) has travelled to Kojima in search of her estranged aunt, Reiko (Junko Kano), her mother’s twin sister, only as it turns out Reiko is a strange and embittered woman who is only ever comfortable in the water. She grudgingly allows Natsumi to stay but only to avoid further island gossip and is unconvinced by her desire to become a pearl diver like her ancestors. As far as we can see, Reiko is one of a handful of divers left on the island and the other two are approaching old age. In fact, there don’t seem to be a lot of other young people around except for Shijo (Kai Hoshino Sandy), an eccentric boat operator and aspiring rapper with a nascent crush on Natsumi. Nevertheless, people on the island mainly remember her mother Akiko as the one who ran off with a fisherman and was never seen again.

Though the older pearl divers are kind to her, not everyone is happy to see an outsider visit and most especially rookie policewoman Yuka (Aoi Shono) who according to some has been given grandiose ideas thanks to going to university on the mainland. She is suspicious of everyone and hungry to uncover some kind of major crime, quickly coming up with an unlikely yakuza invasion as a possible explanation for a missing boat despite the fact that its owner is known to be fond of a drink or two and may simply have neglected to tie it up properly. A patient superior, Sarge (Pierre Taki), tries to explain the nature of small community policing to her that she should integrate more with the people of the island so she can tell when something’s not right and know best how to help. But her zeal for preventing crime eventually leads to accidental cruelty in bluntly divulging upsetting news, smugly proud of her successful bust without reflecting on its implications or the necessary hurt caused by an improper application of her authority as a police officer.

In a way it’s this kind of insensitivity that lies at the centre of the film as it becomes clear that Rieko has wasted the last 18 years of her life in bitterness unable to get over an act of emotional betrayal. She’s sworn off music, which she once loved, and often retreats to her bathroom to plunge herself into the water only really at peace when she’s diving. Looking for a treasure her mother supposedly left for her, Natsumi is diving too, reaching into the past while trying to figure out why her mother and Rieko became estranged and looking for a sense of home and family she feels she’s lost.

That might be the real treasure that her mother left for her even if she has to go diving for it and will need some help to bring it to the surface. In some ways a typical “island movie” about a slightly strange place more or less cut off from time, Rudz hints at a sense of despair in living somewhere there is not much else to do than drink and sing but otherwise captures the warmth of the community most of whom are very welcoming of eccentrics and outsiders even if somewhat prone to gossip for a lack of other entertainment. Through the process of their reconnection, old wounds begin to heal and a kind of peace is found with the past which is in many ways filled with “mermaid’s tears” more than pearls of joy. Still there’s a kind of lament for the songs unsung because of hurt and bitterness, and for the lost love and opportunities that went with them that has its own sense of poignancy tempered by the infinite possibilities of making up for lost time amid the gentle island atmosphere.

All the Songs We Never Sang screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Monster (怪物, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2023)

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Part-way through Hirokazu Koreeda’s probing drama Monster (怪物, Kaibutsu), a distant headmistress tells one of her teachers that “What actually happened doesn’t matter.” As in The Third Murder, the truth, so far as it can be said to exist at all, is an irrelevance. We need narrative to serve a purpose. Confronted by a worried mother, a teacher accused of using violence against a student claims there’s been a “misunderstanding,” but in many ways there has. We’re so often prevented from speaking our truth by the social conventions that govern us, because of shame, or fear, or simply because when all is said and done is it often easier not to speak.

In may ways this is the internal battle Minato (Soya Kurokawa) finds himself fighting. He sees another boy being bullied, mostly just for being different, and he wants to do something about it but he’s different too and so he’s afraid. He befriends the boy, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), but also tells him to not speak to him in front of their classmates because he doesn’t want to end up being a target. In the midst of futility all he can do is flail randomly, trashing the schoolroom not to mention his bedroom at home solely because he is unable to voice himself clearly or communicate in any other way.

Because of these lapses in communication, a series of misunderstandings arise. The language we use is often thoughtless and arbitrary. Well-meaning words can still wound. Minato’s mother, Saori (Sakura Ando), tells him that she promised his late father she’d take care of him until he had a wife and family of his own but perhaps that not something Minato will want. Similarly their teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama), described by one of his colleagues as “shifty-eyed and creepy”, makes a series of throwaway remarks that the boys should act let men, filling their heads with an idea of toxic masculinity echoed in Saori’s insistence that girls prefer boys who don’t know the names of flowers. 

Minato is reminded that the bottom layer of the pyramid holds everything else in place, but it’s a responsibility he doesn’t think he can bear. He knows he can’t be the kind of man his father apparently was, a rugby player who may have been with another woman when he died, and feels an acute sense if failure and inferiority in being unable to live up to the expectations of others. He later tells the headmistress (Yuko Tanaka) who is carrying a burden of her own that he knows he can never be happy and believes himself unworthy of it only to find an unexpected source strength in her advocation that happiness is something anyone can have, otherwise it wouldn’t be happiness at all.

Yet for all that Yori seems to be happy, or at least to affect cheerfulness in all things despite his dismal circumstances living with a troubled father who drinks and refers to him as monstrous and diseased. One of the teachers also brands the parents of his pupils as monsters feeling they unjustly “torture” them while shifting the blame for their own bad parenting. Minato too feels himself to be a monster because he senses that he’s different from those around him and is afraid of them and of himself. Throw away remarks hint at buried prejudice, such as in Hori’s dig at single mothers stating that his own mother was one and exposing a degree of insecurity masked by an outward conservatism.

We judge him for this remark, but it’s also true he’s merely parroting something that was said to him. We can never know all of the truth, and Hori suffers in part because of his “shifty-eyed and creepy” appearance that contributes to our conviction the accusations against him are likely to be true in the same way he misunderstands Minato because of his confusing behaviour and inability to communicate. Gossip weaves itself into a kind of folk truth that becomes difficult to unravel no matter the degree of veracity within it, while we discover we can never know the whole of something only the facets of it that are presented to us and might well result in “misunderstandings.”

Koreeda shifts our perspective and exposes the flaws in our assumptions, illuminating with empathy a sense of a more objective truth that was hidden from us but equally the various reasons we cannot always be truthful even with ourselves nor can we see what others see of us. Obsessed with the idea of rebirth, the boys discover their own kind of paradise in private world in the midst of nature free of social conventions or expectation and free to be exactly as they are. The ambiguity of the ending may subtly undercut its seeming utopianism but nevertheless suggests that the only objective truth may be that happiness is something anyone can have if only they can free themselves from the prejudices and petty social conventions which govern our world.

MONSTER is out in UK and Irish cinemas on March 15th. For more information, go to https://monsteruk.film/ 

Uk trailer (English subtitles)

A Weather Report (胴鳴り, Yu Kajino, 2024)

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A successful television writer is confronted with the mistakes of his past when the teenage daughter he abandoned before birth suddenly tracks him down in Yu Kajino’s indie drama, A Weather Report (胴鳴り, Donari). The film does indeed feature several storms of the more literal kind, but dances around the fallout of the writer’s unexpected reconnection along with his ongoing inability understand himself or the nature of his relationships.

This is in a sense ironic, as Omori’s (Ryuta Furuya) big hit show Cliffs of Love is a poignant romantic drama about two people who are too shy to reveal their feelings openly and consequently can only behave in ways which seem bizarre. Omori later has a similar moment to the lovers from the show when he attempts to take his relationship with casual girlfriend Satsuki further only to find her on a completely different page and explaining to him that they are both people who don’t know how to love or be loved so they were never really destined to be together for the long term. 

Even so, the man we see now, if perhaps a bit of a sleaze, does not really seem like the “human shit” his former partner Mayumi describes him to be. It’s difficult to know what brought the relationship to an end with such apparent recrimination, though the reappearance of his daughter Hikari confronts him with the possibly questionable decision he made to stay out of her life having been told by Mayumi that she intended to raise the child alone and didn’t need his input. He abandoned her with a sense of relief born of parental anxiety, yet now begins to act like a father protecting and nurturing her after she comes all the way from Niigata on the train to find him having fallen out with her mother who has taken up with a smarmy business man, Numata. 

Hikari later ironically remarks that she was never really interested in her mother until they were separated and is getting to know other sides of her thanks to talking to others that knew her. In another way, it might have been the reverse with her father who was otherwise absent from her life leading her to create her own image of him which meeting threatens to shatter. Omori dreams of attending a theme park with his now teenage daughter who is clearly too old for such things, only to suddenly realise she wasn’t with him any more and feel unexpectedly anxious for her. 

It seems that Hikari was hoping he’d be able to do something to oppose her mother’s relationship with Numata though for obvious reasons he is reluctant to do so, politely listening to Numata’s conservative political ranting without saying a word. She sees them float up like ghosts in a hotel corridor and is somehow haunted by their presence though she says she doesn’t mind her mother dating only taking a personal dislike to Numata who was a frequent customer at the bar her mother ran. As for Mayumi herself she too seems to struggle with loving and being loved, still incredibly angry with Omori all these years later while otherwise drinking heavily and playing Momoe Yamaguchi’s Last Song For You on repeat.

In any case, though the unexpected reconnection with her father may strain the relationship she has with her mother it eventually seems to give her a new kind of strength and maturity even as she contends with a self-centred boyfriend who simply rides off on his bike when she challenges him about sleeping with her friend and tries to adjust to the ironic role reversal of her mum moving on by getting a boyfriend leaving her largely home alone. Omori continues to narrate his life while researching his next drama and getting suckered by the bizarre claims of a potential subject just as he begins to interrogate himself and the regret and failures of his life. Set in picturesque Niigata with the fabulous home in which Hikari and her mother live surrounded by the nature, the film has an elemental quality in which a change in the weather can signal calamity or liberation but also a sense of peace amid the serenity of unexpected reconnections.

A Weather Report screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Momoe Yamaguchi – Sayonara no Mukougawa (Last Song for You)

Swimming in a Sand Pool (水深ゼロメートルから, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2024)

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As the film’s title implies, the teenage girls at the centre of Swimming in a Sand Pool (水深ゼロメートルから, Suishin Zero Meter Kara) each find themselves pushing forward but meeting with resistance in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s deadpan teen comedy. Inspired by a high school play, the drama has a timely quality as each of the girls reconsiders what it means to be a woman while simultaneously insisting that gender doesn’t matter. In this case, however, it seems to matter a great deal as they’re forced into the “meaningless” and Sisyphean task of sweeping their swimming pool free of the sand that drifts over from the boys’ baseball game.  

As one of the girls, Chizuru (Mikuri Kiyota), suggests, the boys probably don’t realise (or care) how their actions are inconveniencing them. It’s the middle of summer and the pool is supposed to be undergoing maintenance in August which makes this pointless task seem even more absurd yet after trying to complain to their equally frustrated teacher Yamamoto they’re told they’ve got an attitude problem and it’s only “meaningless” because they’ve decided so in heir heads. As an adult woman, you’d think Yamamoto would have more sympathy or at least some kind of advice for the girls but only seems to want to drum mindless obedience into them, insistent that if she’s told them to do something then it must in fact have meaning. At the end of her tether she snaps that perhaps she doesn’t really like having to conform to the idea of what a teacher should be either, but seems clear that one must do it anyway. Still when a friend from home expresses surprise she’s staying in town over the summer to supervise students, Yamamoto bristles when she remarks that she now seems very like a teacher and is later seen having a covert smoke round the back of the school. 

Obsessed with rules and conformity, one of the chief reasons she’s disliked by the girls is a sense of treachery in having made one, Kokoro (Saki Hamao), humiliate herself by forcing her to participate in a swimming lesson while menstruating. Yamamoto complains that she didn’t ask for an exemption via the appropriate protocols, adding that some girls use it as an “excuse” for getting out of things. Repeatedly the girls accuse each other of using their gender to make excuses for themselves in backing down in front of the boys or allowing themselves to be constrained by social ideas of femininity. Gender is indeed something they seem to think about and dwell on, Kokoro constantly insecure in her appearance while insisting that a girl must be cute in order to count and this is the way she strives for equality with men while simultaneously insisting that gender equality is a myth.

For Miku (Reina Nakayoshi), meanwhile, the opposite maybe true in that she dances the male version of the local folk dance and has done since she was little though now wears a chest binder while she does. Miku seems hurt by Kokoro’s picking at her, eventually walking off and bumping into another girls, Rika, whom it appears she may have a crush on and is a sort of rival of Kokoro’s having beaten her to become manager of the boys’ baseball team. Another girl, Yui, seems to have a similar admiration for swimmer Chizuru but is frustrated by her having experienced a moment of existential crisis being beaten in a race by baseball team star Kusonoki with whom most of the other girls are in love.

What’s true, however, is that none of the girls can do much of anything while desperately trying to sweep up all the dust the boys chucked at them so they can get their pool back and finally swim again. “Don’t take high school girls lightly,” one insists, while another decides to make a “declaration of war” but only seems to elicit snickers from the boys. Nevertheless, through their time shovelling the sand, the girls seem to have come to their own conclusions about the role of gender in their lives and generally discovered a new kind of liberation both from their own self-imposed ideas and the sometimes repressive nature of education that reinforces them. A charming teenage summer comedy, Yamashita nevertheless captures an inspiring sense of rebellion from the students who will no longer be bound by outdated notions of what everyone else tells them they should be.

Swimming in a Sand Pool screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Wash Away (うぉっしゅ, Ikunosuke Okazaki, 2024)

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A disconnected young woman begins to rediscover herself while caring for her ageing grandmother who is largely bedridden and has advanced dementia in Ikunosuke Okazaki’s lighthearted indie drama, Wash Away (うぉっしゅ, Wash). In a sense, the heroine is attempting to wash away loneliness but is ironically unable to scrub away her own while filled with a sense of shame and aimlessness in the city working at a soapland and dreaming of a career in real estate.

Soaplands are are legalised form of sex work in which generally male customers can pay pretty young women to give them a wash. Kana has been working at one for some time under the shop name Koyuki and has made a nice life for herself with a swanky apartment but has avoided returning to visit her family and has led them to believe she’s an estate agent. Despite having a maid visit three times a week, her flat is strewn with rubbish and empty fast food containers which hint at her inability to look after herself along with a sense of internalised shame. She looks to her housekeeper, Mrs Natori, as a kind of surrogate mother and is forever giving her expensive gifts and inviting her to stay for dinner in an attempt to circumvent the loneliness she feels in the false connections of her work in which the customers either become over invested in her Koyuki persona or completely forget her once the appointment is over.

As Mrs Natori later points out, it was Kana herself who had largely forgotten about her grandmother Kie whom she had not seen in at least eight years. When her mother, Sanae, has to be hospitalised for a hip operation she asks Kana to watch Kie during the day to which she reluctantly agrees. Despite not having had any recent contact with her, Kana is still disappointed when Kie cheerfully introduces herself on her arrival as if they were complete strangers meeting for the first time, something she continues to do each day that Kana arrives at the house. The irony is that part of Kana’s job is to wash her grandmother in the same way as she washes customers at the soapload though she encounters the same kind of frustrated connection unable to get through to Kie who is lost in time and often incredibly anxious that she’s late for some kind of event where everyone is waiting for her. 

Though she approaches the responsibility seriously, the truth is that Kana is fed up after the first few setbacks and decides to subcontract her care responsibilities by outsourcing to a professional carer telling herself that her grandmother would probably prefer that anyway. Her friend Sumire seems disappointed in her, remarking that perhaps Kie is in a way lucky to get to experience so many things for the first time again and meet the world with a sense of childish wonder such as in her fascination with colourful plastic balls. In an odd way, caring for her grandmother encourages to Kana to start caring for herself, gaining the confidence to speak honestly with someone she assumes won’t remember anything she says but reassured by Kie’s surprising outburst that work is work and she’s no need to feel ashamed of herself if she approaches it with pride whatever her occupation might be. 

This simple act of interest begins to reawaken something in both of them, Kie’s memory and energy seeming to improve in the light of Kana’s determination that she won’t be forgotten much as she hopes she won’t be either in a constant search for connection. Though she may have thought her grandmother had forgotten her, that she was in a sense invisible and faceless to the customers who bought her services, Kana washes away her misconceptions and learns to see herself again in repurposing her work as an act of care. Okazaki lends the world around her an off kilter quirkiness that is at odds with the despair Kana feels and while never shying away from the difficulties of caring for someone with advanced dementia allows the two women to recover both something of themselves and each other through the simple act of reconnection.

Wash Away screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Japan Academy Film Prize Announces Winners for 47th Edition

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The Japan Academy Film Prize, Japan’s equivalent of the Oscars awarded by the Nippon Academy-Sho Association of industry professionals, has announced the winners for its 47th edition which honours films released Jan. 1 – Dec. 31, 2023 that played in a Tokyo cinema at least three times a day for more than two weeks. Godzilla Minus One takes Best Picture and cleans up in technical categories while actress Sakura Ando scores both supporting and leading awards and Koji Yakusho takes home Best Actor for Perfect Days.

Picture of the Year

Animation of the Year

Director of the Year

  • Wim Wenders (Perfect Days)
  • Hirokazu Koreeda (Monster)
  • Yoichi Narita (Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill)
  • Tatsuya Mori (September 1923)
  • Takashi Yamazaki (Godzilla Minus One)

Screenplay of the Year

  • Toshimichi Saeki, Junichi Inoue, Haruhiko Arai (September 1923)
  • Michio Tsubaki (Shylock’s Children)
  • Masahiro Yamaura, Yoichi Narita (Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill)
  • Takashi Yamazaki (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Yoji Yamada, Yuzo Asahara (Mom, Is That You?!)

Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

  • Haruka Ayase (Revolver Lily)
  • Sakura Ando (Monster)
  • Hana Sugisaki (Ichiko)
  • Minami Hamabe (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Sayuri Yoshinaga (Mom, Is That You?!)

Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

  • Hayato Isomura (The Moon)
  • Kentaro Ito (Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill)
  • Yo Oizumi (Mom, Is That You?!)
  • Ryo Kase (Kubi)
  • Masaki Suda (Father of the Milky Way Railroad)

Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

  • Sakura Ando (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Aya Ueto (Shylock’s Children)
  • Mei Nagano (Mom, Is That You?!)
  • Minami Hamabe (Shin Kamen Rider)
  • Keiko Matsuzaka (Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill)

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography

  • Ryuto Kondo (Monster)
  • Akira Sako (Kingdom III: Flame of Destiny)
  • Kozo Shibasaki (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Masashi Chikamori (Mom, Is That You?!)
  • Takeshi Hamada (Kubi)

Outstanding Achievement in Lighting Direction

  • Eiji Oshita (Monster)
  • Hiroyuki Kase (Kingdom III: Flame of Destiny)
  • Nariyuki Ueda (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Masato Tsuchiyama (Mom, Is That You?!)
  • Hitoshi Takaya (Kubi)

Outstanding Achievement in Music

  • Hiromi (Blue Giant)
  • Takeshi Kobayashi (Kyrie)
  • Ryuichi Sakamoto (Monster)
  • Naoki Sato (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Akira Senju (Mom, Is That You?!)

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction

  • Anri Johjo (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Yukiharu Seshimo (Kubi)
  • Takashi Nishimura (Mom, Is That You?!)
  • So Hashimoto (Legend & Butterfly)
  • Keiko Mitsumatsu, Seo Hyeon-seon (Monster)

Outstanding Achievement in Sound Recording

  • Kentaro Suzuki (Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill)
  • Yasuo Takano (Kubi)
  • Hisafumi Takeuchi (Godzilla Minus One)
  • Kazuhiko Tomita (Monster)
  • Shota Nagamura (Mom, Is That You?!)

Outstanding Achievement in Film Editing

  • Norihiro Iwama (Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill)
  • Takeshi Kitano, Yoshinori Ota (Kubi)
  • Hirokazu Koreeda (Monster)
  • Hiroshi Sugimoto (Mom, Is That You?!)
  • Ryuji Miyajima (Godzilla Minus One)

Outstanding Foreign Language Film

  • Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Barbie
  • Driving Madeleine
  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
  • Tar

Newcomer of the Year 

  • Aina The End (Kyrie)
  • Hiyori Sakurada (Our Secret Diary)
  • Nanoka Hara (Don’t Call it Mystery)
  • Haruka Fukuhara (Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill)
  • Ichikawa Somegoro VIII (The Legend & Butterly)
  • Soya Kurokawa (Monster)
  • Fumiya Takahashi (Our Secret Diary)
  • Hinata Hiiragi (Monster)

Special Award from the Association

  • Koji Omura (hair and makeup)
  • Yumiko Kuga (casting)
  • Teruyuki Hyakusoku (Steenbeck editing table sales, maintenance, inspection, and repair)
  • Keizo Murase (special effects model sculptor)

Award for Distinguished Service from the Chairman

  • Norimichi Ikawa (art director)
  • Masaharu Ueda (cinematographer)
  • Akira Kobayashi (actor)
  • Tadashi Sakai (art director)
  • Yoichi Higashi (director)
  • Kazuo Yabe (lighting)

Special Award from the Chairman

  • Ryuichi Sakamoto (composer)
  • Shuji Abe (producer)

Special Award

  • Cine Bazar 
  • Tokyo Laboratory

Popularity Awards

(Decided via public vote)

Movie: kyrie

Actor: Yuki Yamada (Kingdom III: Flame of Destiny, Godzilla Minus One,  Tokyo Revengers 2 : Bloody Halloween : Destiny / Decisive Battle, Blue Giant)

Sumiko 22 (スミコ22, Sawako Fukuoka, 2024)

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22-year-old Sumiko is beginning to fear that she’s losing her sense of self. Even when she hangs out with her friends, she can’t think of anything interesting to say nor does anything they say spark much of an interest. Sawako Fukuoka’s breezy, New Wave-inspired dramedy captures the sense of malaise among young people today who are quickly disillusioned with the conventionality of a stereotypical adulthood while becoming aware that all that awaits them is the constant exploitation of eternal overtime and compulsory afterwork socialising.

That might be one reason why Sumiko (Haruna Hori) quit the job she got after graduating university after only a few months. But then by contrast, her friend describes her 9 to 5 office job as “wonderful,” though adding that she works for a more benign company who have a minimum overtime policy and seem to care about her work/life balance. Her other friend is not so lucky, explaining that he’s expected to work from 7am to 11pm, though can take half the month off. He breaks down in a karaoke booth, in tears screaming that he wants to quit his job. It’s all a bit too much for Sumiko who makes a quiet exit to grab some fresh air. 

Though Sumiko puts a cheerful face on it, we often see her seemingly caught motionless in moments of complete and total despair. She doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing with her life and has no real sense of direction. Nevertheless, we can see that through her sometimes strange enoucounters she begins to regain an interest in the world along with a desire for forward motion, taking an active role in her life by offering a slice of pizza from the restaurant where she works to a man who plays the recorder in the underpass she’s sometimes fantasised about dating.

We see her gleefully draw a little cat in the sauce on top of her salisbury steak only to be middle rebuked by a radio host who can’t abide such childishness, but in a sense this is exactly what Sumiko is striving for the freedom to be cheerful and creative rather than a soulless drone valued only for her productivity. Another of her roommates also has his quirks, displaying a toy dinosaur called Tom on his bike that so impresses the proprietor of a restaurant that she makes him a little bow tie.

Sumiko lives a relaxed life, working at the pizza restaurant and otherwise spending her days wandering the neighbourhood, playing frisbee with her roommate Hana, or hanging out with friends. A female convenience store worker flirts with her awkwardly, first bonding over a shared love of cats and then admiring the line of her arms and the way they bend at the elbow. She watches a couple fight at a vending machine and then worries that she’s been rude in informing a woman wearing white jeans that her underwear line was visible when she bent down to tie her laces. The woman later seemingly becomes a friend, appearing in a short film Sumiko makes capturing the quirky surreality of her life.

Drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, Fukuoka adds a deadpan voiceover to narrate Sumiko’s aimless days each broken into sections from her diary complete with an adorable crayon doodle. Sumiko might be hit by small moments of despair but otherwise remains cheerful, embracing the simplicity of her life along with the company of her friends even if it is sometimes a little hard to bear. She thinks she was born to eat cake and is obsessed with salmon, finding the moments of small joy in her life and along with them a new sense of purpose and direction that might in its own way be simply to stay still, living as she pleases and embracing her aimlessness as freedom rather than anxiety. Cute and quirky in its surreality the film captures something of life’s absurdity, but also displays a boundless empathy for those like Sumiko who aren’t so much lost as aimlessly on their way to the place they were they were always supposed to be.

Sumiko 22 screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Amalock (あまろっく, Kazuhiro Nakamura, 2024)

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The purpose of a lock, at least far as those on water are concerned, is to keep everything on an even keel and protect the surrounding area from flooding. From the lock’s point of view it might be a thankless task, people never notice you’re there unless you’ve somehow failed at your job but the lock is ever present and always about its duty even if it might be difficult to understand. For all of these reasons, the heroine of Kazuhiro Nakamura’s gentle indie drama had come to think of her father as the titular Amalock (あまろっく) but often resented him for it, seeing him only as lazy and irresponsible.

For Ryutaro (Tsurube Shofukutei), meanwhile, laughter was the only way to make life bearable. His motto was to always enjoy the things that happen in life be they good or bad which is why he puts out a congratulations sign when his grown up daughter Yuko (Noriko Eguchi) returns home after being made redundant. Despite being good at her job and in receipt of several commendations for her work, Yuko is simply not pleasant to be around and creates tension in the office with her grumpy aloofness and tendency to make younger male members of staff cry in front of her. 

The implication is that Yuko became the exact opposite of the father she thought was feckless and of no use to anyone, yet mainly finds herself lying in front of the TV in a tracksuit mainlining snacks exactly as he had done when she was a child. Seemingly trapped in an intense depression, she makes no attempt to find new work for eight years, instead being supported by her father’s moribund ironmongers. The surprise news that he plans to remarry 20 years after her mother’s death to a woman barely 20 who works at the townhall sends shockwaves through her life and turns her into a petulant, resentful teenager who can’t accept her new stepmother.

The situation is of course ridiculous. Yuko is almost 40 and Saki (Ayami Nakajo), Ryutaro’s new wife, makes no attempt to wield authority over her beyond the well-meaning attempts to introduce potential husbands more because she thinks it would be nice for her to have someone than she wants her out of the house. Even so, Yuko’s problem is that she can’t understand the way her father works and that his cheerful attitude to life has value to those around him who are buoyed up by his friendliness and easy going nature even when times are hard. Like the Amalock, he’s always been there quietly supporting her despite her scorn and resentment, preventing her from becoming overwhelmed by the floodwaters of life tragedies.

In his way, he’s done something similar for Saki who ironically only ever wanted what Yuko could have had in a happy “harmonious” family having experienced a series of troubles of her own. Saki honours Yuko’s mother’s memory and includes it in her vision of the “family,” but struggles to get through to Yuko who remains difficult and resentful unable to see the value in the kind of life that Saki wants or in herself as human who might benefit more from interacting with others. The twin stressors of unexpected tragedy and a tentative marriage proposal from a man who turned out to know her little better than she thought begin to shift her perspective allowing her to see what it really was her father brought to the world and what she might bring to it too if only she were less serious about things that don’t really matter.

That is after all how you find your way to a harmonious life, becoming an Amalock for others who can also be an Amalock for you and might be willing to make a few compromises to make that happen. Set in the tranquil town of Amagasaki, Nakamura’s gentle tale captures a little of life’s absurdities along with the simple power of good humour to make life easier to bear. Rooted in tragedy as it may be, Ryutaro’s philosophy of making life a celebration has its merits and ones which are not lost on a newly enlightened Yuko becoming more and more like her father but also like herself at the heart of a harmonious family.

Amalock screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Snowdrop (スノードロップ, Kota Yoshida, 2024)

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As the heroine of Kota Yoshida’s Snowdrop (スノードロップ) says close to the end of the film, you can become used to living in miserable circumstances and bear it because it is your normal but being suddenly confronted by them does nothing other than compound your misery. At least that’s how it seemed to her while attempting to register for social security payments after her father suffers a workplace accident and needs surgery they can’t afford in order to be well enough to be employed and earn money. 

Then again, her family circumstances are a little unusual in that her father, Eiji, left when she was little only to return 25 years later and ask to be taken in again swearing he’d work hard. Nearly 20 years after that, Naoko (Aki Nishihara) has had to give up working to care for her mother who has advanced dementia and requires round the clock care leaving Eiji as the only breadwinner though he is also elderly and working only as a newspaper delivery man which already makes it very difficult for them to make ends meet. It’s Eiji’s boss who suggests they apply for government help so that Eiji can get treatment for the gout that’s affecting his legs and get well enough to work again, though it’s clear that the family feel a degree of shame about the idea of accepting assistance even though as social worker Munemura points out it’s something that’s available to everyone should they ever need it.

The problem is however that you have to prove that you’re struggling which can be a long and difficult process. Naoko later describes it as a kind of humiliation, that she was forced to parade her penury and by doing so was confronted by the misery of her circumstances. Munemura describes her as a very earnest woman and is impressed by the way she meticulously fills in all the correct forms while the house, when they come to inspect it, is tidy and well kept (something which might actually go against you in other countries) even if they’re eying up her car and wondering if she really needs it. Munemura also sympathises with her on a personal level, realising from the forms that Eiji must have been absent from the family for an extended period and that they suffered because of it while it must also have been hard for Naoko caring for her severely ill mother alone for over 10 years.

Naoko herself has a largely beaten down, defeated aura in which she’s given up on the idea of a future for herself. She later describes caring for her mother as its own kind of escape in that she always found it difficult to get along with other people and never felt confident at work so being a carer became a kind of identity for her that she also feared losing if they were successful in their application and were able to secure nursing assistance for her mother. As well-meaning as Munemura is, she is not perhaps in the position of being able to see or deal with all sides of the issues someone like Naoko faces and is therefore shocked by the dark place her despair eventually takes her. Munemura faces a similar issue with a woman in her 70s whose claims that the cleaning job they insisted she take was simply too difficult for her at her age is treated with less than total sympathy by her slightly more cynical colleague.

A largely unexplored subplot in which it’s implied there was another sister who was given up because of the father’s abandonment and the family’s poverty hints at a deep-seated childhood trauma but also fissure within the family itself as Naoko explains her actions solely with the justification “we were a family” as if she too feared being left behind or abandoned even while her older sister has evidently been able have a family of her own though is also very sympathetic towards Naoko and in no way holds her responsible anything that happened. All she really wanted was an escape from her misery, which she may in a way get with the fresh shoots of a new life already visible to her if only she can embrace them. Shot with a detached naturalism, Yoshida’s drama is often bleak though does not lack for empathy and especially for those like Naoko who are largely left to deal with their misery all alone.

Snowdrop screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Blue Imagine (ブルーイマジン, Urara Matsubayashi, 2024)

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Over the past few years, there have been a series of scandals exposing a culture rampant sexual harassment and abuse which has long been an inextricable part of the Japanese film industry. Just recently, a director very like the one in Urara Matsubayashi’s indie drama Blue Imagine (ブルーイマジン) was arrested following several accusations of sexual assault though like his film counterpart insists that he has done nothing wrong and all his relationships were consensual. 

This is the battle that the women face. When Noeru (Mayu Yamaguchi), an aspiring actress, tries to take her case to the press she’s first met by a scruffy reporter who puts it to her that she willingly participated in a game and her problem is she didn’t get her half of the bargain rather than having been victimised by a predatory man. The reporter claims that they have women like that in the office who are keen to accompany older men for drinks or dinner in the hopes of getting ahead. In retrospect, one could see Tagawa’s treatment of her as a kind of grooming. He love bombs her with praise for her talent and then half promises her a leading role in his upcoming film before attempting to take advantage her. He insists he’s done nothing wrong, and perhaps on some level believes he simply seduced the women he assaulted unable to see how the power he wields over them prevents them from refusing or resisting him. Then again, he and his producer routinely engage in misogynistic banter and wilfully give false hope to the actors who take part in his workshops hoping to bolster their chances of landing professional gigs. 

Eventually it’s this wilful crushing of dreams that begins to get to Noeru along with the knowledge that Tagawa is still out there probably doing the same thing to other women aided and abetted by a misogyinistc culture that prevents the women from speaking out through shame and social stigma. When Noeru tells her brother, a lawyer, what happened to her he snaps back that this is why he didn’t want her to become an actress as if she’s somehow brought it on herself. A female reporter who treats their case with sympathy encounters something similar when her editor is relcutant to publish because to him it’s just how things work in the entertainment industry so there’s not really a story in it. 

Yet the waters are muddied a little by a sub plot revolving around the concept of compensated dating or as it’s now called “sugar dating” in which young women “date” wealthy older men who provide them with material goods rather than money. One of Noeru’s friends encounters the dangerous side of the arrangement when her Daddy becomes violent and possessive, threatening to leak nude photos of her if she chooses to break up with him. Her friend Yurina (Yui Kitamura) disapproves of what she’s doing which is in effect what the actresses were accused of in engaging in, a solely transactional relationship. A young man Noeru meets who lives in the floors above the refuge she later begins helping out at sees some of their fliers but immediately says they aren’t really for him, which seems like an ironic comment though it’s also of course true that men also suffer sexual harassment from both men and women while facing a similar but different level of social stigma to the women who are just beginning to find the strength to speak out thanks to their newfound solidarity.

Much of this is due to the efforts of Michiyo who runs Blue Imagine to support women who’ve suffered sexual assault or violence. Her Filipina barmaid Jessica also suffered domestic abuse at the hands of her Japanese husband which was compounded by her vulnerability as foreign national knowing her husband could use her immigration status as a further tool to control her while she had little access to help or support.Yet it’s she who tells Noeru that silence is also complicity and she should speak out to the extent that she is able in order to improve the situation for women in the film industry or at least put a stop to Tagawa’s abuse of power.

Confronted at a press conference for his film that is still shockingly going ahead, Tagawa denies everything while the leading actress is forced to say that he was a perfect gentleman only later asking why he and the producer bullied her into a nude scene that wasn’t in her contract or why it was so important for her to take off all her clothes. Pressed by the women for a explantation for his assaults he offers only that his sexual desire was too powerful. The female reporter and her colleague bemoan the lack of progress over lunch, but also refer to another scandal about a minister and his secretary though it turns out not even to be the one the female reporter thought they were talking about. 

In the end, however, it’s less about changing the film industry or in indeed society at large as it is about solidarity between women as symbolised by the closing scenes in which everyone at Blue Imagine sits down to dinner together to enjoy traditional Filipino food prepared by Jessica and another woman who arrives at the refuge after suffering domestic violence. Through bonding with other women in similar positions and making the decision to fight back, Noeru comes to make peace with herself and begins moving past her trauma determined to support other women in the hope that something will finally change. Shot with a down to earth naturalism, the film may at times feel bleak and filled with a sense of despair yet displays its own resilience and eventual serenity born of female solidarity and long-awaited self acceptance,

Blue Imagine screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)