Year: 1984
Duration: 117'


Japan, the 1950s. Sanjum Im is the son of Korean immigrants who remained in Japan after the end of the war. As he returns to Tokyo at the end of his summer vacation, he stops to visit his father’s best friend, Akio Matsumoto, a Korean immigrant who lives with his Japanese wife and their adopted daughter, Kayako. Sanjum and Kayako become pen pals, but the constant fights between her adopted parents induce the girl
to run away from home. Sanjum goes in search of her; he finds her and the two  move to Tokyo together. But their happiness is marred by another escape.


“When cinema was born, spectators were surprised to see things like trains in motion. Faith in ‘motion’ is the basis of the cinematographic creation. But after one hundred years of history, cinema now asks itself what ‘motion’ truly is. Sanjum and Kayako are both strangers, immobile and without any protection in an inhospitable land. I tried to visualize the immobility of the two protagonists: their ‘motion’ comes from within.”

Biography

film director

Kohei Oguri

Kohei Oguri (Maebashi, Japan, 1945), after graduating in drama from the University of Waseda, worked as assistant director for Masahiro Shinoda and Kiriro Urayama. In 1981 he directed his first film, Muddy River (the screen adaptation of a novel by Teru Miyamoto), which tells of the difficulties of a group of young people in Osaka during the 1950s and which represented a return to the genre of shomingeki, neo-realistic tragicomedy in black and white. The film received an Oscar nomination for best foreign film and second prize at the Festival of Moscow. In 1984, his second film, For Kayako, based on a novel by Hwe-Song Lee about discrimination against Koreans in Japan, won the George Sadoul prize. In 1990 his film The Sting of Death was  awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Festival of Cannes and the FIPRESCI prize. In 1996 he directed the film Sleeping Man, Grand Jury Prize at the Festival of Montreal. In 2005, after almost a decade’s absence, he shot The Buried Forest, a metaphysical fable that shows daily life in a small mountain village. The film was presented in the section Quinzaine des Réalizateurs at the Festival of Cannes.

FILMOGRAFIA

Doro no Kawa (Muddy River, 1981), Kayako no Tameni (1984), Shi no Toge (The Sting of Death, 1990), Nemuru Otoko (Sleeping Man, 1996), Umoregi (The Buried Forest, 2005).

Cast

& Credits

regia/director Kohei Oguri
soggetto/story dal romanzo omonimo di/from the novel of the same title by Hwe-Song Lee
sceneggiatura/screenplay Kohei Oguri,Shogo Ohta
fotografia/cinematography Shohei Ando
montaggio/film editing Nobuo Ogawa
scenografia/production design Akira Naito
musica/music Kurodo Mohri
suono/sound Hideo Nishizaki
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Sunghil O (Sanjun Im), Kaho Minami (Kayako Matsumoto), Jun Hamamura (Akio Matsumoto), Kayako Sono (Toshi Matsumoto), Takeshi Kato (Kyusu Im), Takuzo Kawatani (Irujun Im), Tokie Hidari (Shinsyun Ku), Tami Hon (Myonhi Chie), Toshie Kobayashi (la zia di Kayako/Kayako’s Aunt), Taiji Tonoyama (l’uomo sul treno/Man on the Train), Masato Furuoya (Cho Paku)
produttore/producer Fujio Sunaoka
produzione/production Himawari Theatre Group Inc.
vendita all’estero/world sales Gold View
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