Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • 2017 • Japan
Starring Shunsuke Kubozuka, Shinnosuke Mitsushima, Keishi Nagatsuka

After 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 the director had originally hoped to make even before his legendary feature debut HOUSE in 1977. In the spring of 1941, wide-eyed seventeen-year-old Toshihiko Sakakiyama (Shunsuke Kubozuka) arrives in the coastal town of Karatsu in Saga Prefecture and befriends a group of teenage classmates who fall in love, quarrel, and stumble through their remaining days of youth as war looms on the horizon. An extravagantly stylized epic that makes the most of green screens, elaborate lighting and dizzying editing, Obayashi’s passion project and penultimate film is a grand culmination of the great director’s dazzling visual style and a poignant reminder of the tragedy of war.