Director
Yui Kiyohara
Japan / 2022
116 min.
/ Original version with English subtitles
Original language
Japanese
Tama New Town is a residential area to the west of Tokyo, built in the mid-60s when housing costs were exploding in Japan’s capital. Multi-storey residential blocks, swathes of green parks and communal public space bear witness to a social vision that has since passed into history.
The latest film from Yui Kiyohara – who previously screened OUR HOUSE at the Forum in 2018 – follows three women over the course of one day as they move in and around Tama New Town. It is a film built around the quotidian: appointments at the job centre, bus rides, cycling, the pleasure of seeing early summer blooms in the park or glimpsing ever-new perspectives on utilitarian architecture. The three characters occasionally cross paths, such as when the eldest of the trio imitates the younger’s movements as she dances in the park. This is all orchestrated by camerawork and editing that demonstrate a remarkable sense of intimacy and distance and an equally unerring awareness of the optimal moment for an unexpected counter-shot; here and there a synthesiser intrudes into the proceedings, spitting out gurgling, rattling sounds in the gentlest of ways. (Cristina Nord)
Production Mayumi Amano. Production company PFF PARTNERS (Pia/HoriPro Inc./NIKKATSU) / PFF General Incorporated Association (Tokio, Japan). Director Yui Kiyohara. Screenplay Yui Kiyohara. Cinematography Yukiko Iioka. Editing Azusa Yamazaki. Music jon no son. Sound design Young Chang Hwang. Production design Shinpei Inoue. Costumes Kei Taguchi. Make-up Rie Ooya. Assistant director Satoshi Noboriyama. Production manager Atsuko Senda. With Kumi Hyodo, Minami Ohba, Ai Mikami, Guama Uchida, Tadashi Okuno, Shintaro Yuya, Mizuho Nojima.
World sales Parallax Films.
Yui Kiyohara, born in Tokyo, Japan in 1992, she studied film directing. Her thesis film OUR HOUSE was shown at the Berlinale Forum in 2018.
Films: 2017: Our House (Berlinale Forum, 80 min.). 2022: Subete no Yoru wo Omoidasu / Remembering Every Night.