Cenotes—sources of water that in ancient Mayan civilization were said to connect the real world and the afterlife. The past and present of the people living in and around them intersect, and distant memories echo throughout immersive scenes of light and darkness.
This faux-documentary follows a butoh master, a fashion designer, and a filmmaker racing against time to create art and help a young girl in love.
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.
A young Japanese woman named Eri is intelligent and promising, but remains mired in depression and alienation. She wanders life like a ghost, articulating her suffering perspectives in repetitive thoughts and journals. Everything changes when she decides to write a romance fantasy for the way she wished things would go, including an alter ego named Rie meeting a man named Fuyuki in love at first sight. Her debut novel "Soft Cream Love" is a huge hit, and Eri is catapulted to wealth and circles of admirers. Shy, she blows her chance to meet a cute guy and instead makes a pass at her clumsy unattractive agent named Hoshino, who walks away with his cynical attitudes born of romantic disappointment. When she pursues him into the street, she by chance meets a nice guy just as she hoped, but he never shows up at their first date because, unknown to her, he's hit by a car.
A young woman works as a waitress in a diner. Her relationship with her boyfriend is unfulfilling and to further complicate things she is obsessed with a large hemangioma, or benign vascular tumor, on her hip (one that we actually never see). One day after she encounters a mysterious man wearing a hood and playing a clarinet she discover a small shack built out of cardboard. She crawls into it and suddenly we are transported to this young woman's interior world, a place where she meets her own doppelgänger in the form of a large doll who bears the same birthmark on her hip.
Kidlat Tahimik, a director and performer, sought to recreate relations between the body and filmed image seen through "Asian eyes." This groundbreaking project took the form of a documentary which Mr. Tahimik directed and in which he performed himself in order to show his own thinking about the different views of the body held by the "East" and the "West."
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami destroyed large parts of the small town of Rikuzentakata. Here, Hiromi ABE hosts a radio show in which she reports on local events and interviews the residents. She focuses not only on the time after the disaster and the ongoing rebuilding of the community, but also on recording personal stories.
