Maborosi

One of Japan’s foremost contemporary filmmakers made his feature debut with this delicate portrait of loss and regeneration. Five years after a young wife and mother loses her husband in an unforeseen tragedy, she re-marries and moves to a small rural fishing village. She adapts gradually, but still finds herself subject to an ache she can’t soothe or name. Like Yasujiro Ozu before him, Hirokazu Kore-eda has a rare sensitivity to the place of individuals within the natural world, a cautious faith in the restorative powers of nature, family and romantic love, and an equally strong conviction, expressed with the lightest of touches, that some things can never be restored.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's new film Like Father, Like Son is screening in the Main Slate of the 51st New York Film Festival.