Vicarious Trips To Greece, Brazil, Japan And More Through Streaming Cinema
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This lack of travel has made me quite twitchy. Fortunately, I ve found a sort-of/not-quite solution making a great escape by watching a flurry of international films.
The California Film Institute and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are helping out wanderlusters like me, whisking us away from the same-oldness of our homebound lives via their choice offerings.
This week, Pass the Remote hopscotches vicariously to Brazil, Puerto Rico and on over to Greece, Japan and even tours a futuristic Ukraine.
Japan’s Naomi Kawase is among the tenderest of filmmakers you can often sense her caring presence off-camera, in a good way and her latest, “True Mothers,” is a fine example of this Cannes-honored director’s sensitivity and lyricism. They’re especially strong assets here, because this story of teen pregnancy, adoption, and belonging adapted from a novel by Mizuki Tsujimura is the kind of material that can easily lend itself to melodrama. In Kawase’s delicate hands, however, it breathes with an everyday poignancy.
We first meet kind, anxious Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaku) and her devoted husband (Arata Iura) as the parents of 6-year-old Asato, a sweet-faced boy entering kindergarten. An extended flashback fills in an emotionally wrought backstory: after fertility treatments went nowhere, the distraught couple turned to an adoption agency that houses young women with unwanted pregnancies and upon the handing over of the newborn, legally terminates any relationship with the
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Cecilia Aldarondo immerses us into various regions of Puerto Rico to reflect its history and challenges in Landfall. (Courtesy of the Pacific Film Archive)
This lack of travel has made me quite twitchy. Fortunately, I’ve found a sort-of/not-quite solution making a great escape by watching a flurry of international films.
The California Film Institute and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are helping out wanderlusters like me, whisking us away from the same-oldness of our homebound lives via their choice offerings.
This week, Pass the Remote hopscotches vicariously to Brazil, Puerto Rico and on over to Greece, Japan and even tours a futuristic Ukraine.
âTrue Mothersâ Review: Family Entanglements
Parents clash in this Japanese melodrama from Naomi Kawase.
Aju Makita in “True Mothers.”Credit.Film Movement
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Remarkably resistant to sentimentality in individual scenes yet baldly manipulative in the big picture, the melodrama âTrue Mothersâ is probably the most mainstream effort yet from Naomi Kawase, a Japanese director who hasnât received much distribution in the United States but has been a mainstay of the Cannes Film Festival for two decades. Although the pandemic canceled the festival in May, in June the Cannes programmers announced âTrue Mothersâ as an official selection of the event-that-wasnât (and later screened it at a mini-festival in October). The movie has the sort of densely plotted texture and widely accessible emotions that might have earned it the Palme dâOr
True Mothers review: Naomi Kawase s film explores nuances of motherhood but succumbs to its clichés The film made its Indian premiere at the 26th Kolkata International Film Festival this year, and is Japan s official nominee for the Oscars 2021. Arshia Dhar January 19, 2021 14:26:30 IST A still from True Mothers. Facebook/GroupPlaytime
It is a rather curious fortuity how I happened to watch two films that premiered in India last week, centered on mothers and ideas of motherhood one being Renuka Shahane s
Tribhanga starring Kajol, Tanvi Azmi and Mithila Palkar on Netflix, and the second being Japanese director Naomi Kawase s
True Mothers (2020) at the 26th Kolkata International Film Festival. My primary grouse with stories on motherhood is their pathological need to virtue signal, which in this case the former managed to subvert, while the la