Young Chang Hwang

A young woman spends a day in some non-place between town and countryside, has random encounters and watches stones skip over the surface of the river. Tatsunari Ota’s film explores a world without productivity and finds joy in idle time and playfulness.

　漫画家を目指す青年・草介は、絶滅したニホンオオカミが題材の漫画に挑むが、資料が少なく思うように描けず苦悩していた。そんなある日、バイト先の工事現場で動物の頭蓋骨らしきものを発見し、さらなる骨を求めて夜の工事現場に忍び込む。すると飼い犬を探す女性ミドリと遭遇し、彼女は驚いた拍子に足を怪我してしまう。歩けなくなったミドリを背負い、彼女の家族が営む写真館へと向かう草介だったが…。

Aki and Naoko are childhood friends who are drifting apart as adults. Immersed in her family life, Naoko now has a husband and daughter; Aki, on the other hand, remains single and is on leave from work due to a personal crisis. The plot might sound familiar but it has never been told like this. The director Kusano Natsuka stages the interactions through an actors’ table-read and, as the lines are repeated, the scenes gradually develop into on-location conversations. Moreover, she repositions the dramatic peak of the story to the beginning: Aki has murdered Naoko’s daughter.

Reiko teaches at an acting school while working as an actress. Her career has stalled, but she gets a chance to appear in a feature film from a theater group friend who is now a famous actor. Reiko is elated, but then she gets a call from her mother Yukie.

The first part of a trilogy focusing on the northeast Tohoku region, co-directed by Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke. Impromptu interviews were carried out with disaster victims mainly along the Sanriku Coast, which had been ravaged by tsunamis several times prior to the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, and makes emotional discoveries within dialogues between close-knit people including families and workmates.