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.

도쿄 중심가, 만화가 지망생인 소스케는 일본 늑대에 대한 만화를 그리고 있지만 멸종된 늑대 그리는 것을 어려워한다. 소스케는 어느 겨울날 일용직으로 일하던 건설 현장에서 불에 탄 동물 해골을 발견하게 된다. 늑대일지도 모른다는 생각에 해골의 정체를 알아내기 위해 동네를 돌아다니다 어떤 신비로운 여자와 가족을 만나게 된다. 그리고 그녀를 통해 도쿄 지하에 묻힌 과거 전쟁의 기억을 발견한다.

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.