Tag: Camera Japan

Gifts from the Kitchen (キッチンから花束を, Hisashi Kikuchi, 2024)

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One of the few places offering Chinese-style home cooking, Fumin had become a home from for many during the 50 years its founder worked her kitchen herself. Fumi Sai has now retired, though welcoming one set of guests a day to her home, but there are many who continue to visit the restaurant under the management of her nephew Kazuyoshi and reminisce over their long years of enjoying not just the cooking but a familial relationship with Fumi herself. 

Collaboration with the clientele is cited by many as a reason Fumi’s restaurant became so popular. After a few years of working as a hairdresser, she decided to open a cafe after a friend remarked it was a shame more people didn’t have the opportunity to taste her cooking. Her first location was a tiny bar-style place with a handful of seats at the counter which of course meant that she was able to build up close relationships through talking directly to her customers. Others describe her cooking style as spontaneous, that she would come up with new dishes just by adding something or other to see how it would taste but she also took hints from customers as well sometimes adding their successful requests to the main menu and allowing them to feel as if they were fully involved in the restaurant. It’s this sense of connection brokered by an exchange of tastes that seems to be integral to the degree of warm feeling many have for the place and for Fumi herself.

Director Kikuchi frequently switches between testimonials from regular customers some going back decades and many remarking on the incongruous sight of Fumi herself, a small woman battling a giant wok in the centre of the kitchen. All these years later and despite the expanded capacity there are always queues to get in while customers claim that there are dishes they might not otherwise care for or actively dislike but that Fumi alone can make appetising. She attributes her skill to her upbringing in a Taiwanese family where her sisters joke their father had a gambling problem and didn’t work but did do most of the family cooking. She picks up new ideas on trips to the island nation and on one occasion visits a Taiwanese woman to experience more home cooking who also points out that cooking is imbued with emotion. Fumi’s own enthusiasm and love of the craft finds its way in, delivering care and attention to her customers who just as often may be looking for somewhere to belong as much as a good meal.

The film otherwise does not pry too much into Fumi’s personal life, never stepping too far outside the restaurant save for exploring her relationship with nephew Kazuyoshi and three younger sisters as well as her soon to be 100-year-old mother who was responsible for the restaurant’s constant supply of Taiwanese sausages. Food is a family affair, the now elderly women recalling the dishes they remember from their childhood and putting on a large spread for New Year. Yet the restaurant is also a kind of home for Fumi, one she admits she was reluctant to leave. She’d never considered a successor, but later came round to the idea of entrusting it to her nephew and head chef. 

As other guests remark, food a means of building body and soul. The nourishing wholesomeness of Fumi’s cooking seems to have a positive effect on those who visit the restaurant which was often home to various celebrities from the illustrators and designers of the surrounding area to the top stars of the day such as Tora-san himself, not to mention sustaining her mother to the ripe old age of almost a century. Guests describe her as a radiant character, like someone in an animation, an improbably small woman filled with a warmth that draws others to her offering comfort and connection through food but also an artist whose medium was cooking creating a series of unique dishes that couldn’t be found anywhere else yet quickly offering to teach anyone who wanted to know how to make them. A tribute to a bygone era, Kikuchi captures a sense of nostalgia for simple pleasures but equally of pleasure in the moment for as Fumi says to eat is to live.

Gifts from the Kitchen screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tatsumi (辰巳, Hiroshi Shoji, 2023)

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The titular Tatsumi (辰巳) laments that there used to be a line. They used to be better than this. But his incredibly duplicitous boss just laughs at him and says they can’t live on honour and humanity anymore. In any case, there didn’t seem to be much honour or humanity in Tatsumi’s decidedly unglamorous life of petty gangsterdom even before everything went to hell but despite his cynicism and seeming indifference he is the last holdout for some kind of gangster nobility.

Though he has a cover job as a fisherman, Tatsumi’s (Yuya Endo) main hustle is as a cleanup agent getting rid of inconvenient bodies for various gangs. He finds himself mixed up in local drama when a pair of crazed, sadistic gangsters become aware someone’s been skimming their meth supply. They torture and kill a suspect who leads them to another, garage owner Yamaoka (Ryuhei Watabe) who is married to an old flame of Tatsumi’s, Kyoko (Nanami Kameda), while her younger sister, Aoi (Kokoro Morita), is also in trouble with another rival ganger, Goto (Takenori Goto), on the suspicion of having pinched some of his meth supply. Tatsumi ends up agreeing to mediate for Aoi, gets much more than he bargained for when the crazed Ryuji (Tomoyuki Kuramoto) murders Yamaoka and Kyoko and Aoi becomes a secondary target after catching him in the act.

Ryuji doesn’t seem to care about tying up loose ends, but just wants Aoi dead for reasons of total vengeance. It’s his uncontrolled violence that has disrupted the equilibrium of the local gangster society though the proposed solution is simply more violence in allowing him to kill the people he wanted to kill in the hope he’ll then calm down and stop which seems unlikely. Like many similarly themed yakuza dramas, Ryuji’s violence appears to have a sexually charged quality and there is also a hint of a potential relationship between Ryuji and Tatsumi’s boss whom he calls “Skipper.” 

Ryuji also has a slightly less crazy sibling in an echo of the relationship Tatsumi once had with his own brother who died of a drugs overdose having become involved in petty crime. The implication is that Tatsumi gave up on his brother and was relieved when he died but also that he harbours a degree of guilt for preventing him ending up the way he did and not trying harder to save him. That may partly be why he decides to help Aoi, seeing echoes of the brother he couldn’t save while she is also friendless alone having unwisely made enemies of almost everyone because of her outrageous behaviour and reckless disregard for authority. Aoi has an unpleasant habit of spitting at people who upset her while otherwise adopting a devil-may-care attitude with those minded to kill her. If she did skim from Goto’s stash, it cost the life of another falsely accused underling. 

Despite himself, Tatsumi becomes increasingly determined to help Aoi even though or perhaps because he assumes neither of them is likely to survive this crisis. Desperately trying to stay one step ahead he plays one side against the other and tries to find the best angle for escape while knowing there probably isn’t one. Shoji sets the tale across a series of moribund jetties and shacks laying bare the busy emptiness of this world with only the sea beyond. “Emotion will make you fail,” Tatsumi tells Aoi while describing dead bodies as just things and trying to keep his cool when needled by Ryuji or another dangerous and violent gangster. 

Death and life by extension appear to be meaningless and of little value. Tatsumi does perhaps close a circle, or maybe more than one, as the last principled gangster who thought there ought to be a line between what they do and greedy thuggery only to find there never was one and his determination not to cross it is the kind of sentimentality that can get a man killed. Making good use of slow dissolves, Shoji revels in a retro aesthetic in a tale of moral compromise and redemption as Tatsumi determines to safeguard Aoi not only from her own reckless impulses but the meaningless emptiness of the gangster life and the toxic legacy of violence and fallacy of vengeance as a salve for the wounds of the soul.

Tatsumi screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド, Masashi Iijima, 2024)

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An avalanche approaches a small town in Japan, a harbinger of change in which the centuries old practice of bear hunting has finally been put to rest by government directive. The buried question at the centre of Masashi Iijima’s Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド) is who exactly that land has been promised to and what the rights and responsibilities surrounding it are in the midst of a changing society in which there may longer be a place for the hunter.

Some might argue that there shouldn’t be, and it has to be said this is one ancient tradition that’s increasingly hard to defend. Set in 1983, the film finds the “Matagi”, or traditional hunter, already all but extinct even before the head of the local association (which appears to only have five members) calls them all together and tells them the hunt is off for that year due to a preservation order by local government. One of the younger members, Rei (Kanichiro), immediately objects sensing that if the hunt is canceled this year it will never be held again. He says he thinks it’s unfair as it’s industry encroaching on the forests that has led to a decrease in the bear population rather than overhunting while another of the men takes constant pops at rich men from the city who come in and treat hunting like a hobby failing to abide by any of their rules such as not shooting mothers with their cubs.

The hunters seem to think of themselves as keeping nature in check, “culling” the bears to keep the mountain safe though there’s no sign that they are any real danger to humans and anyway their numbers are now depleted. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to defend this practice outside of tradition, but it’s evidently something very important to Rei, important enough to constitute a large part of his identity. Thus he alone is determined to defy the order and kill a bear anyway even though he knows there’s a good chance of going to prison for illegal hunting and being branded a poacher. 

Rei ropes in Nobu (Rairu Sugita), a childhood friend who apparently owes a debt to him having received a blood transfusion from him when he was four and now deeply resents having that fact wielded against him all these years later. Unlike Rei, Nobu is a much more modern young man whose father makes fun of him for wearing fashionable clothes and perfume. He hates working on his father’s farm and longs to escape the moribund small town and its brutal traditions such as the bear hunt he’s been roped into since birth just because like many things his ancestors always did it. While hunting for a bear, the pair have an opportunity to talk, Rei admitting that hunting and the gun represent for him the essence of the man he once was while reeling from the breakdown of his marriage to a woman he failed to support when she failed to fit in to village life. He recounts the story of a banker he did some work for who says that he envies the freedom of his life as a landscape gardener while he sits in a prison all day counting other people’s money but when he asks him why he does’t give it a try the man just backtracks and starts making excuses.

Rei seems to be wondering what true freedom means and perhaps feels he doesn’t really have it, asserting dominance over the mountain by killing the bear to regain control over his life. He calls the bears a gift from the mountain god as if they existed only for him to kill, though it’s difficult to see why his tradition or need for raw masculinity is worth more than a living creature’s life. When he eventually kills a bear, the film hovers on the ritualistic quality of the act as Nobu and Rei bend over the body, wafting it with leaves, and skinning its pelt before drinking its blood. This is an act of cruelty more of necessity. They have no need of the pelt or meat, do not make a major part of their income from selling them, and the bear did not threaten them. This is in short a tradition that can safely be left by the wayside, but by the film’s conclusion the two men seem to have switched positions Rei now pondering leaving the village while Nobu seemingly has a renewed desire to stay and preserve these old traditions. Perhaps it is his promised land after all, or else was intended to exist for the bears as creatures of nature free from the destructive forces of humanity.

Promised Land screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Worlds Apart (違国日記, Natsuki Seta, 2024)

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Adapted from the manga by Tomoko Yamashita, Natsuki Seta’s quietly empathetic drama Worlds Apart (違国日記, Ikoku Nikki) eventually reveals the private lonelinesses and hidden sorrows that everyone has which isolate them from others. The film’s Japanese title plays on a homonym for the word for “foreign country” instead using the character for “different” which in itself suggests each person is an entire world often unable to make contact or be fully understood by those who cannot after all ever travel there. 

Perhaps that’s something most people feel every once in a while but becomes acutely obvious to 15-year-old Asa (Ikoi Hayase) when her parents are killed in a surreal traffic accident in the film’s opening scenes. She sits struck dumb and vacant at the funeral, having no idea what’s going to happen to her now while other relatives crassly describe her as having been cast adrift like an “unwanted barrel”. It’s this insensitive phrase that seems to drive her aunt Makio (Yui Aragaki), a novelist, into an impromptu decision to offer to take her in though they had only met briefly long in the past and had no real relationship with each other. Makio had been estranged from her sister for many years and never makes any attempt to disguise her utter loathing and resentment towards her for having been so cruel and judgemental when they were children. 

It’s refreshing, in a way, that the film doesn’t encourage her to change her feelings after her sister’s death. She doesn’t discover another side to her through bonding with Asa nor are her feelings invalidated much as Asa originally tries to make her like her mother as a means of reclaiming her. In fact, what Makio does is normalise whatever way Asa is feeling telling her at the hospital when forced to identify her parents bodies that it’s alright not to know how she feels. The two sisters were it seems very different, though the grandmother eventually offers an explanation that Makio’s sister had once been seriously ill and therefore unable to live a “normal life” which might explain why she was so enraged by Makio’s decision to chart her own course and wilfully spurn conventionality. 

These are also hints to the hidden world contained with the diaries Asa’s mother left behind to opened when she graduated high school. Makio wrestles with whether or not to pass the notebooks on and when, unsure if Asa is ready to receive the knowledge that might be inside them. Though she settles in to Makio’s home quite comfortably, Asa keeps her grief and occasional bouts of resentment to herself. Seta often frames her as standing alone in vast empty spaces or total darkness, isolated and lonely, now displaced by her liminal status no longer anybody’s daughter but not quite independent. 

Yet this isolation also blinds her to that of others. She doesn’t quite pick up on it when she clumsily attempts to talk about boys with her best friend Emily (Rina Komiyama) who directly tells her she has no interest in them and deflects the question when she asks if she likes girls instead. Emily is also lonely and isolated in feeling anxious to reveal her sexuality to Asa who in any case reacts clumsily when she eventually does. A similar thing happens with a girl in their class who studied hard to apply for a special programme only to be told the organisers are looking for a male student because it requires “physical strength,” while Asa also seems to develop a fascination with a bass player in the school music club who declines an offer to collaborate because she doesn’t want to get her hopes up only to be disappointed in the end. 

Makio hadn’t previously wanted to share her life, separating from an old boyfriend she still seems attached to out of an apparent fear of intimacy but nevertheless opens herself to Asa in deciding to respect her as an adult giving her agency over her own choices along with good, empathetic advice while simultaneously being clear that she doesn’t know if she can come to love her given the depth of hatred and resentment she bore towards her sister. But what the pair of them realise is that good or bad they can each share their memories rather than being forced into a frosty silence even if as Makio points out Asa will never understand her hurt and she will never understand Asa’s loneliness. Gentle and wholesome, the film ironically lays bare how opening up to others can in fact expand the world inside you instead filling the space rather than leaving you isolated inside it and returning light to a world that might otherwise have seemed dark and lonely.

Worlds Apart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Alien’s Daydream (地球星人（エイリアン）は空想する, Yoshiki Matsumoto, 2023)

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Who can really say what’s real and what’s not, who gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? The journalistic hero of Yoshiki Matsumoto’s Alien’s Daydream (地球星人（エイリアン）は空想する, Chikyu Seijin (Alien) wa Kusosuru) is asked each of these questions when railing against the absurdities of his latest assignment, a possible UFO hotspot in an otherwise remote area of Japan. In addition to the question of whether there is life on other planets, Ito is confronted by questions of press ethics as he begins to wonder if telling the truth is really the right thing to do.

In many ways, Uto’s (Yukichi Tanaka) problem is his rigidity. He doesn’t like injustice, so he stands up to some people bullying a homeless man but then also threatens to report him to the police pointing at the no loitering sign behind him. He something similar while visiting the space museum in the UFO town, abruptly breaking off his interview to confront a young woman and ask her if she has a ticket even though it’s not his responsibility seeing as he doesn’t work there and in fact it’s none of his business. Uto likes to think of himself as a serious journalist and and wants to do real investigations into the things he thinks matter, but is employed by a sleazy tabloid mainly interested in celebrity sex scandals and bits of weird news like the UFO town. 

That’s one reason Uto had little interest in going, but in the end doesn’t have much choice and is surprised to find there actually might be a story in it after all even if not quite the one his boss might be looking for. A local man is claiming to have been abducted by aliens and dumped in a random place some distance from where he was taken, while the girl he interrogated about her ticket, Noa, keeps making cryptic statements about “earthlings”, refers to aliens as her “people” and is fascinated by crop circles.

What he eventually discovers is that Noa may really have been kidnapped a few years ago if by a more terrestrial presence and subsequently brainwashed by a UFO worshipping cult. He realises that to some, including the girl’s mother, the stuff about aliens is a harmless delusion and blessing in disguise that prevents her from remembering what “really” happened. Uto want to write an article stating what how thinks it was, but if he does so there’a chance Noa may find out the “truth” and have her illusions shattered. He goes ahead and publishes anyway, but then realises his central hypothesis may have been incorrect and he’s fingered the wrong man. He then has another dilemma of whether or not to correct his article with Noa’s mother and friends each saying it’s better if he just lets it stand as the truth so that at least Noa won’t be branded a crazy cultist.

It turns out the local UFO lore has a surprisingly long history dating back to the Edo era which has given rise to a series of folk legends. The space museum itself is designed to resemble the pre-modern UFO and is a decidedly strange place where the manager is constantly shadowed by a man in a green alien mask.Yet what Uto is later learns is that we are all perhaps lonely aliens, each from different planets which is why we’re so different from each other. Uto himself often seems somehow alien in his rigidity and black of white way of thinking, a quality perfectly brought out by Yukichi Tanaka’s stiffness and often vacant stare. Noa asks him if he isn’t tire of living his life like that, so needlessly uptight and unimaginative and perhaps in a way he is though he soon turns the equation around on her. Dividing the film into 10 chapters each with a strange and childlike illustration, Matsumoto adds a touch of whimsical absurdity to what could otherwise be quite a dark tale. Uto may have to learn that he isn’t the arbiter of the truth, selling believable lies to a readership looking for something to make life more interesting, but is free to find the truth for himself because it is of course out there for those want to believe. 

Alien’s Daydream screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Camera Japan Announces Complete Programme for 2024

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Camera Japan returns for its 19th edition in Rotterdam 26th to 29th September and in Amsterdam 3rd to 6th October bringing with it another fantastic selection of the best in recent and not so recent Japanese cinema.

Feature Films

  • Afterschool Anglers Club – a bullied teen makes new friends through fishing in Hideo Jojo’s laidback drama.
  • Alien’s Daydream – surreal drama in which a jaded reporter investigates reports of alien activity.
  • All the Long Nights – mismatched colleagues struggling amid contemporary corporate culture find unexpected solidarity in Sho Miyake’s gentle human drama. Review.
  • All the Songs We Never Sang – 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. Review.
  • Baby Assassins: Nice Days – the Baby Assassins try to have a nice holiday but instead find themslves facing off against a rogue hitman. Review.
  • The Box Man – those who obsess over the Box Man, become the Box Man, in Gakuryu Ishii’s adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel. Review.
  • Bushido – a stoical ronin’s peaceful life is disrupted by a face from the past in Kazuya Shiraishi’s elegantly lensed period drama. Review.
  • Confession – latest from Nobuhiro Yamashita starring Toma Ikuta and Yang Ik-june as two men hiking in memory of a late friend.
  • Desert of Namibia – a young woman struggles with the conditions of modern living.
  • Fly Me to the Saitama – From Biwa Lake with Love – Osaka is on the March in the sequel to the popular comedy. Review.
  • Great Absence – a forced reconnection with his estranged father forces a young man to contemplate the great absences of life in Kei Chikaura’s poetic drama.
  • Hoyaman – the tranquil island life of a pair of brothers is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious woman in Teruaki Shoji’s quirky comedy. Review.
  • Ichiko – when a young woman disappears, it transpires that she never existed in the first place in Akihiro Toda’s twisty psychological mystery. Review.
  • Kyrie – musical drama from Shunji Iwai told over 10 years and starring AiNA THE END as a street musician who can only communicate through song.
  • Let’s Go Karaoke! – an old school yakuza and high school boy find themselves fighting similar battles through the medium of Karaoke in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s zany comedy. Review.
  • The Moon – a formerly successful author struggling with personal tragedy takes a job at a care home and is shocked by what she finds in Yuya Ishii’s hard-hitting drama.
  • One Second Ahead, One Second Behind – misaligned romantics eventually rediscover a long forgotten connection in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s take on Taiwanese rom-com My Missing Valentine. Review.
  • Penalty Loop – a man trapped in a timeloop of vengeance begins to realise the fallacy of revenge in Shinji Araki’s absurdist drama. Review.
  • Promised Land – a young man takes drastic action when traditional bear hunting is called off.
  • Qualia – a timid poultry farmer’s wife begins to feel her coop’s a little cramped after unwittingly inviting her husband’s mistress to live with them in Ryo Ushimaru’s quirky family dramedy. Review.
  • Retake – a diffident teenage boy finds himself editing in real time in Kota Nakano’s movie-making summer holiday movie. Review.
  • Shin Masked Rider – Hideaki Anno’s take on the classic tokusatsu series.
  • Sin and Evil – when their friend is murdered, three teenage boys end up killing a man they assume to be responsible and then carry on with their lives only for the case to echo 20 years later.
  • Six Singing Women – a man finds himself trapped in a strange place after travelling to the mountains in the wake of his estranged father’s death in Yoshimasa Ishibashi’s surreal drama. Review.
  • Stay Mum – on returning to care for estranged father, a woman finds herself taking care of a neglected little boy in Kosai Sekine’s maternal melodrama. Review.
  • Swimming in a Sand Pool – a group of high school girls ponder the role of gender in their lives while shovelling the sand in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s charming teen comedy. Review.
  • Tatsumi – a fisherman/cleaner for a drug gang teams up with his ex-girlfriend’s sister to avenge her death.
  • Till the Day I Can Laugh about My Blues – lonely young woman bonds with a mysterious girl after being given a magic kaleidoscope.
  • Worlds Apart – a young woman goes to live with her eccentric aunt after her parents are killed in an accident in a gentle drama from Natsuki Seta.
  • Yoko – an isolated woman begins to rediscover herself while hitchhiking to her estranged father’s funeral in Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s quietly moving road movie. Review.

Animation

Documentary

Special Screenings

  • All Mixed Up – new restoration of Yasuzo Masumura’s adaptation of the Tanizaki novel Quicksand.
  • Hoodlum Soldier – first in the series of films featuring Shintaro Katsu.
  • Kisses – Masumura’s debut feature subverts the Sun Tribe narrative for sweet and charming youth romance.
  • Nakano Spy School – drama starring Raizo Ichikawa as a recruit at Japan’s famous espionage academy.
  • The Wife’s Confession – searing drama starring Ayako Wakao as a wife accused of killing her husband. Review.

Camera Japan 2024 takes place in Rotterdam 26th to 29th September and Amsterdam 3rd to 6th October. Full information on all the films as well as ticketing links can be found on the official website and you can also keep up to date with all the latest news via Camera Japan’s official Facebook page, X (formerly known as Twitter) account, and Instagram channel.

The Rest of Our Lives (ラストターン　福山健二71歳、二度目の青春, Shinji Kuma, 2023)

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A pair of elderly men struggle to find meaning in their lives in the face of well-meaning infantilism and health anxiety in Shinji Kuma’s warmhearted ageing drama, The Rest of Our Lives (ラストターン　福山健二71歳、二度目の青春,, Last Turn: Fukuyama Kenji 71-sai, Nidome no Seishun). They are not, however, the only ones as even younger people find themselves consumed by existential confusion when reaching a natural turning point and accepting that their lives will have to change. Yet through their various relationships each begins to come to a new accommodation with the present and accept that though their lives may be different than before there are still many things for them to do. 

Kenji lost his wife two years previously having cared for her as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s. These days he likes to take a walk around the neighbourhood and then get on with his usual business though even he begins to realise that he’s become forgetful and is prone to doing strange things like leaving the remote control for the TV in the freezer. His son lives far away but is worried enough about him to install an iPad on the wall so they can call each other any time and he can also check in on him to make sure Kenji hasn’t had a fall or anything like that. But to Kenji it obviously seems like an imposition, his son’s basically spying on him and taking away his privacy along with a little of his independence. Satoru has also been checking out homes and recommends an organisation for elderly people where he can get health advice, stay active, and avoid social isolation. 

Only at the centre he starts to feel insulted, irritated that the staff members talk to them as if there were small children while getting them to do weird exercise regimes that make him feel silly. One elderly gentleman, Hashimoto, eventually storms out exclaiming that they aren’t in kindergarten anymore instantly earning Kenji’s admiration. Even so, as it turns out they are very different men. While Kenji is somewhat reserved and polite, Hashimoto is a chatterbox who makes constant inappropriate comments about women he probably only (just) gets away with because of his age and otherwise loudmouth personality. The friendship between them is slow to develop for this reason, but also because Kenji seems to have forgotten what it’s like to have a friend and accidentally upsets him leading Hashimoto to think that perhaps he is just annoying Kenji and should leave him alone. 

At the swimming pool they’re encouraged to go to, the pair run into Kaori, a former competitive swimmer like them struggling to accept the physical decline of her body along the end of her sporting career. Now working as an instructor she finds teaching an uphill battle partly in her buried resentment but also through a lack of empathy for her students unable to remember what it was like to not be able to swim and impatient with those lagging behind. They are all looking for ways to reorient themselves, not so much because of their age because of the immense changes in their lives along with a sense of loneliness. Kenji lives alone, but even Hashimoto who has moved in with his son confesses that the often feels in the way and once again infantilised seeing as they’ve given him a traditional Japanese room which lacks a locking door. 

Yet the realisation Kenji comes to is that their fear of becoming a burden is misplaced. It’s alright to ask for help when you need it and even better to offer it where you can such as in his thoughtful decision to walk a neighbourhood dog that barks all the time because the elderly lady who owned him passed away and her son’s out all day at work. Shining a light on the lives of the elderly in an increasingly ageing Japan, the film is makes a gentle plea for intergenerational solidarity and a more compassionate society that is responsive to the needs of others and cares for everyone equally. Kenji and Hashimoto marvel that even in their old age they still take pleasure in learning new things while allowing themselves to accept help as a gesture of love while making sure to return the favour wherever they can. 

The Rest of Our Lives screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Sabakan (サバカン SABAKAN, Tomoki Kanazawa, 2022)

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A melancholy middle-aged writer looks back to a climactic summer of his youth and the ghost of fractured friendship in Tomoki Kanazawa’s heartwarming nostalgia fest, Sabakan (サバカン SABAKAN). A classic summer adventure movie, the film finds a sense of warmth in childhood memory but also reflects on all that at the time it was impossible to understand along with a sadness in the inevitable end of summer as two boys chase the spectre of dolphins in an otherwise tranquil seaside town.

In the present day, Takaaki (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is a struggling author and divorced father already behind on his child support. When he mentions working on another novel, his agent laughs at him that books like that don’t sell while trying to convince him to take a job ghostwriting for an Instagram influencer going viral for her dieting tips. Perhaps because the agent had described his writing as “quick and easy to read”, essentially anonymous and empty, he begins meditating on his childhood self repeatedly praised for his writing by a teacher who is perhaps a little easily moved. 

The summer of 1986 was the beginning of the Bubble era and Takaaki’s memories are indeed filled with a series of cultural touchstones such as the idol Yuki Saito whose poster the young Takaaki sometimes kisses after dancing around singing her hits. All of which is one reason why the poverty of his classmate Kenji (Konosuke Harada) has made him even more of an outcast bullied by the other kids who follow him home and make fun of the rundown house with tarp covering the roof that he lives in with his mother (Shihori Kanjiya) and several siblings. His fisherman father died some years ago and his mother works in the local supermarket doing her best to support five kinds on a part-timer’s salary. Kenji takes a liking to Takaaki because he’s the only kid who didn’t join with the others when they laughed at him, more or less blackmailing him into a summer adventure looking for dolphins in a cove over the mountain. 

Even the younger Takaaki reflects there probably weren’t any dolphins in the first place, Kenji just wanted to go on adventure with him and didn’t otherwise know how to ask. A careless word from his otherwise warm and supportive mother provokes a minor rift in the boys’ relationship that despite himself the younger Takaaki didn’t quite understand causing him to pull away from Kenji in an unwarranted sense of rejection unable to recognise that he is simply awkward and has low self-esteem which caused him to question the reality of their friendship. In any case though they are later separated by unexpected tragedy, their connection becomes a touchstone for each of them reminding them that they are not alone even if no longer together. 

Kanazawa captures an impish sense of fun the boys’ adventure as they find themselves in a tricky situation with a trio of thuggish delinquents and meet an equally melancholy teenage girl at the shore who stares mournfully at a washed up can of Korean soda and explains sadly as she looks out over the sea that she herself has not been there yet. The Yuki Saito poster comes down, signalling the arrival of a coming of age and the putting away of childish things as Takaaki moves into a more concrete adulthood while still floundering in adolescent confusion and the inability to fully understand his new friendship or its growing importance in his life. 

The adult him understands only too well, meditating on his memories and triggered by nostalgia on seeing a can of mackerel and remembering the carefree summer of his youth. The rediscovery of a childhood bond begins to open him up both artistically and in his relationship with the wife and daughter from whom he is separated. Told with humour and warmth, the film is filled with a sense of childhood wonder and the comfort of the everyday largely undimmed by the entrance of tragedy and the essential sadness of summer’s end. Even so it allows its melancholy hero to find a kind of salvation not only in childhood memories of dolphins and canned mackerel but in the enduring quality of a friendship that itself may have become distant.

Sabakan screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート, Kenichi Ugana, 2023)

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“This film depicts a pure and genuine love between an awkward boy and a girl with a pure heart,” according to a pop idol starring in a film called “garbage love”, but it’s a true enough description of Kenichi Ugana’s genre-crossing slasher romance, Love Will Tear Us Apart (ラヴ・ウィル・テア・アス・アパート). Co-scripted by Hirobumi Watanabe, the film has a deadpan, surreal sensibility but has a lot to say about entrenched patriarchy and a bullying culture. 

As the film begins, Wakaba is a cheerful little girl who has an all encompassing obsession with a handsome pop idol, but is secretly enduring an oppressive atmosphere of domestic violence in her family home at the hands of her cruel and violent father. In this she might have found a kindred spirit in classmate Koki who is enduring physical abuse at the hands of his mother who openly tells him how much happier she’d be if only he’d never been born. Koki is also being bullied by a pair of mean kids at school and meekly takes it, unable to stand up for himself. When Wakaba steps up and tries to help him, the bullies turn on her too and their teacher (Atsuko Maeda) seemingly does nothing. After the pair bond through a screaming session at a local river, the bullies mysteriously fall out of a window which Koki is then seen ominously staring out of. 

The film jumps on seven years to a teenage Wakaba (Sayu Kubota) who discovers the world is not a safe place for women, repeatedly encountering a series of skeevy guys beginning with her favourite pop band who lure her to a cabin in the woods where they openly talk about getting her drunk to take advantage of her or spiking her drinks. One of the chief victimisers is another woman, Moeka, whose apparent “job” it is to recruit girls for the guys to have fun with. Wakaba’s friend Kanna (Riko) wants to leave, sensing that there’s something not quite right but Wakaba is naive and unable to see the danger. A similar thing happens when she visits Tokyo alone and has a meet cute with a guy who spills coffee on her shirt and offers to buy her a new one, then to show her around, takes her for sushi, declares his love and makes a proposal of marriage. 

As might be expected, many of these men end up dead at the hands of a vicious, chainsaw-wielding serial killer in a white hazmat suit, gas mask, and goggles. You can’t quite blame him for his crimes because everyone he kills is so irrediambly awful while it really does seem that he might be trying to protect Wakaba in some way from the hidden dangers she remains unable to see because of her pure heartedness. While her own father had been cruel and violent, she discovers that Moeka’s, police detective Kamiyama (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), is the opposite but worse in his unsettling obsession with his daughter, whom he believed to “pure and earnest” little knowing that she had been procuring young girls to serve up to the sleazy band members.

In a strange way, the serial killer turns out to be Wakaba’s healthiest relationship even if he’s basically stalking her not to mention murdering people with chainsaws because they threatened her happiness. The film runs through a series of genres from the cute childhood romance that soon turns ominous and the cabin in the woods slasher movie complete with creepy monkey and trainset, to martial arts epic as Wakaba abandons her life to train with a YouTube serial killer catching guru in a tropical resort town but retains its sense of anarchic innocence and internal integrity. As the pop star had implied, it really is a tale of genuine love between an awkward boy and a pure hearted girl in which they gradually realise that they each have a right to be happy and can be so together despite all violence and mayhem around them which includes killing a guy by shoving a grapefruit blender on his head. Strange and absurd the film nevertheless has a heartwarming romantic sensibility along with a desire for a less destructive world defined more by kindness and compassion than bullying and violence. 

Love Will Tear Us Apart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

A Mother’s Touch (桜色の風が咲く, Junpei Matsumoto, 2022)

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A young man begins to ponder the meaning of his life while losing both his sight and hearing in Junpei Matsumoto’s heartwarming biopic, A Mother’s Touch (桜色の風が咲く,Sakurairo no Kaze ga Saku). The English title aptly hints at the maternal devotion that kept Satoshi (Taketo Tanaka) part of the world even as he feared becoming isolated from it, though the Japanese “when the pink wind blooms” leans towards the poetic in echoing the ways in which he is able to open himself to a different kind of sensory experience. 

Satoshi Fujisawa would later go on to become the first deaf blind university professor in Japan though the films opens with a toddler Satoshi discovering that he has a rare condition that causes the pressure in his eyeball to increase endangering his vision. Though he undergoes various treatments, he eventually loses the sight in one eye and then the other several years later. While in high school he then discovers that he is also beginning to lose his hearing which, along with braille, had been his primary way of experiencing the world around him. 

Matsumoto’s film does not really go into the various ways in which Satoshi is inconvenienced by a largely ableist society aside from his having to leave home and go to Tokyo to attend a school for the blind. Satoshi does, however, experience bullying as a child particularly from an obnoxious gang of boys who egg him on to remove his glass eye in front of them while otherwise isolated by the constant need to rest his eyes with only rakugo to listen to on the radio. Introduced to braille, he is immediately fascinated remarking that the person who came up with it must have been a genius and explaining that he has not given up on his sight but it doesn’t hurt to learn. 

It’s braille that eventually becomes his lifeline as his mother figures out a way to communicate with him by pressing his fingers as she were typing on a braille keyboard while he replies vocally. Her adhoc solution has apparently gone on to provide an important means communication for other deaf blind people across the world and reminds Satoshi that though he may feel as if he as been marooned in deep space he is not alone and is able to interact with the world around him. While still trying to save his hearing, he had decided to try an alternative treatment method which emphasised heavy exercise and bland food designed to boost the immune system though he discovered that it only robbed him of an additional sensory input and a resultant longing to eat something sweet. Though he is unable to see or hear, he can still taste and smell the world around him welcoming the spring in unexpected ways while embracing his potential and independence.

That said, his major philosophy is that life is full of voids designed for other people to fill in the ways that we can all help each other. The film doesn’t shy away from exploring the strain placed on Satoshi’s family as they try to cope with his medical needs which leave his mother feeling guilty that she is often away from her other two children caring for him at the hospital, and his father lonely and overburdened while trying to balance the demands of his working life with that of taking over the domestic space. In any case, they resolve to get through it as a family doing what they can to support Satoshi without robbing him of the opportunity to lead as independent a life as possible. Satoshi comes to believe that his disabilities may be the price for his purpose, that there must be something he is uniquely supposed to do with his life along with places only he could discover. The film eventually finds him in a space of possibility, recalling happy times with his family as a child but also looking forward towards a new potential for pushing the boundaries and moving beyond the limitations others might have placed on him. 

A Mother’s Touch screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)