![]() With no soundtracks all along the movie, Kawase’s talent lies in the almost muted acting of her nonprofessional actors, allowing instead emotions to take the lead. Waiting for her at some time, the old man looks as if he was still playing, but finally entering the abundant and shrouding forest, they embark on a long and sensitive two-day journey of mutual discovery.įilmed in a documentary-realistic style, the camera shyly follows the characters in their intimacies and interactions inside the delicate and simple setup of the surroundings of Naomi Kawase’s hometown. Machiko runs for help, while Shigeki escapes in a watermelon field. Halfway, the car falls for no apparent reason into a ditch. On Shigeki's birthday, Machiko takes him for a drive in the abundant countryside. Running after each other again, they soon disappear in an overwhelming green aerial shot of the precisely carved box tree. Then, playing hide and seek in a gratifying field of tube-shaped bushes, for more than four minutes at the screen, the two characters joyfully chuckle out of breath. He falls off and starts running while Machiko follows him, screaming. One day, Shigeki cheerfully decides to climb a tree under the happy laugh of the other residents. The viewer soon understands that these two characters are linked by grief, while the nurse secretly suffers from the loss of her child, the old man is still devoted to his long-time departed wife. As the old man is acting more and more like a child due to his disease, Machiko develops a maternal form of caring for him. In the first third of the story, the young Machiko gently bonds with Shigeki, an old man who is facing dementia in a small and peaceful retirement house, lost in the mountains. The Mourning Forest may seem like a minimalist movie, but the parsimonious style is done to the profit of emotional stimulation. In 1995 she was rewarded for both The Mourning Forest and Katatsumori at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival which marks the beginning of her uprising as influential filmmaker. With a great deal of interest in autobiography, her films often include extracts of her own difficult life path like in Katatsumori, where she filmed her everyday life with her grandmother, the woman who raised her. ![]() Drawn towards documentary aesthetics and keened by its ability to be anchored in reality, she soon started to film Embracing, a documentary exploring her own search for the father she never had. ![]() Kawase graduated from the Visual Arts College of Osaka in 1989, then spent 4 years as a lecturer before finally doing what she had always been wanting to do… directing. ![]() With her delicate eye, she put images on sensitive human emotions as on those rural Japanese traditions that cradled her throughout childhood. It can be seen as an intense journey to a completed grief, the film is also an emotional ageless friendship story, and a definite ode to Japanese’s wonderful landscapes.īorn in 1969 in Nara, Japan, Naomi Kawase is a one-of-a-kind filmmaker. Focused on the story of a young nurse named Machiko and an old grieving man named Shigeki, The Mourning Forest can be appreciated through different layers. At dawn, the mountain is quietly removed from its haze blanket as the elderly, from a small retirement home on top of the hill, are waking up from their foggy dream. ![]() In the middle of a harmonious green plain somewhere in Japan, the ring of bells and the sound of men’s prayer follow a funeral procession. ![]()
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