Directed by Kimi Takesue • 2016 • United States
Filmmaker Kimi Takesue finds an unlikely collaborator while visiting her grandfather Tom in Hawai’i. A recent widower in his nineties, Tom seems content to go about his daily routines until he shows surprising interest in his granddaughter’s stalled romantic screenplay. In alternately funny and poignant discussions, Kimi’s fictional love story—and Tom’s creative revisions—serve as a vehicle for his past memories of love and loss to surface. Shot over six years, this intimate meditation on family and absence expands the vernacular of the home movie to consider how history is accumulated in the everyday and how sparks of humor and creativity can animate an ordinary life.
Up Next in 21st Century Cinema
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Casting Blossoms to the Sky
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • 2012 • Japan
Starring Yasuko Matsuyuki, Masahiro Takashima, Natsuki HaradaIn the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake, journalist Reiko Endo (Yasuko Matsuyuki) travels to the city of Nagaoka as it prepares for an annual fireworks festival memorializing the fallen v...
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Hanagatami
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • 2017 • Japan
Starring Shunsuke Kubozuka, Shinnosuke Mitsushima, Keishi NagatsukaAfter being diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer at the age of eighty, Nobuhiko Obayashi set out to fulfill his filmmaking dream: an adaptation of a 1937 novella by Kazuo Dan that th...
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Seven Weeks
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • 2014 • Japan
Starring Toru Shinagawa, Takako Tokiwa, Yumi AdachiIn his follow-up to CASTING BLOSSOMS TO THE SKY, Nobuhiko Obayashi continues to explore themes of lost love, memory, war, and art. At 2:46 PM on March 11, 2013, Mitsuo Suzuki (Toru Shinagawa) takes h...
