©Courtesy of Film Movement
The Film Movement has dropped a new trailer for a highly anticipated Japanese Oscar winning director Chie Hayakawa’s latest outing, “Renoir.”
The film takes place in suburban Tokyo, 1987. Imaginative eleven-year-old Fuki begins her summer break lonely and adrift – her kind, terminally ill father has landed once again in the hospital and her mother, distracted by the inevitability of his diagnosis, hasn’t much time for her daughter.
Fuki responds to the situation not with tears but with placid curiosity about the prospect of death – becoming fascinated by the occult and experimenting with hypnotism. As the summer passes, Fuki encounters a string of lonely, imperfect adults, all of whom nudge her closer to an emotional truth she isn’t quite ready to name yet.
Chie Hayakawa’s sophomore feature, nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes and a Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, is a tender, often unsettling portrait of childhood grief and the sinuous imagination of an inquisitive young girl.
Led by transfixing newcomer Yui Suzuki, RENOIR “delicately articulates the girl’s inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season,” and “steps to a delicate rhythm whose echo isn’t heard until the very end.”
The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival Festival last year. The film won Best Screenplay, Best New Performer (Yui Suzuki) at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
