Warped Forest, The (2011) d. Miki, Shunichiro (Japan)
It isn’t often that a director can so effortless create an alternate universe where the rules of our waking world no longer correspond to the one we’re seeing projected. Co-writer/director Miki, however, has done just that with his passion project rife with sexual imagery, exotic lifeforms and floating pyramids with corresponding orbiting spheres. Interpretations of the film’s underlying intentions could fill several books, but it also succeeds as a work of pure fancy where odd creatures wander the landscape, people one-sixth the size of “normal” humans occupy the same world without comment, and all sexual energies are directed to the consuming of suggestively shaped fruit. A major work from the co-director of 2005’s The Funky Forest.
Himizu (2011) d. Sono, Shion (Japan)
Writer/director Sono (Suicide Club) delivers an overwhelming and cathartic cinematic response to the tragic events of March 11, 2011, when Japan was rocked by a 8.9 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami. An adaptation of Minoru Funuraya’s manga, Sono explores the life of a 15-year-old (an extraordinary Shota Sometani) in the wake of the aftermath, whose life was oppressive enough before Mother Nature stepped in, what with a philandering mother, drunken and abusive father, faltering family boat rental business and a small community of homeless squatters living outside his front door.
Wrestling daily with suicidal thoughts, the youth resists emotional engagement with his community of well-intentioned misfits, the most determined of which being an idolizing female classmate (Fumi Nikaido) whose unsinkable spirit provides Himizu’s bloody beating heart. Not an easy film to watch for multiple reasons, but one that had tears rolling down my cheeks during its final moments as Sono and his two young leads (both of whom won awards at the Venice Film Festival last September) deliver an excruciatingly raw and devastating message of hope for a crippled nation. Not the least bit “fantastic,” gory or futuristic, but a breathtaking work of beauty and soul.
