One film that I totally loved was Hula Girls, a film about the real story of a mining town in Northern Japan and the attempts of a group of young girls to bring some sunshine to their community that has been declining along with the mining trade.
The film which swept the Japanese Academy Awards is really wonderful, has some great performances, especially by its 2 stars, Yasuko Matsuyuki, a dancer who after her career went downhill, accepts a job as a dancing instructor in this small town and her favorite student, played by Yu Aoi, who won the Japanese Academy's Best Supporting Actress award.
The film is probably a little more commercial than one would expect from a Film Festival, but it is really sweet and leaves you with a smile on your face.
I also had the chance to see Kiroshi Kurosawa's new film Retribution and like most of Kurosawa's films (no relation to Akira Kurosawa) it's full of ghosts, doppelgangers (or maybe not?) and many other supernatural references, while at the same time dealing with what is at the heart of all his films: our loneliness.
The always excellent, Koji Yakusho (Babel), plays a detective, who after discovering the body of a woman drowned in seawater begins to fear that it was him who committed the crime, even though he has no recollection of such an event. A series of similar murders and the strange behavior of the murderers leads him to a downward spiral from which there appears to be no escape. As with all of Kurosawa's films, the film lacks any type of structure and even when you expect a Hollywood ending, you get the exact opposite. I didn't like it as much as his previous film, Bright future, (one of my favorite films of 2003) but it's still one of the best I've seen lately and one of the most horrifying portrayals of what we as human beings are capable of and how lonely one can be in the world's largest city.
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