JAPAN CUTS 2011 screening: "Sketches of Kaitan City"

Bleak is beautiful in Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s humanist masterpiece. Set in the fictional shipbuilding town of Kaitan, modelled after Hakodate, the film is based on an unfinished posthumous book by Yasushi Sato, who once drew comparisons with Haruki Murakami. In five parables of working-class struggle and quiet, existential, economic despair, Kumakiri delineates unfeasibly realistic and dramatic sad-scapes that sometimes seem not so much photographed as cast in iron.