After the Storm
classified PG SPlease note: This was screened in June 2017
Another gem from celebrated Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Our Little Sister, Still Walking), who returns with a powerful story about a broken family and the father's dogged attempts to glue it back together.
Divorced father Ryota (Abe hiroshi), is a one-time novelist who can't afford to pay child support to his ex-wife, and so risks not seeing his young son, Shingo. Ryota seeks literary material by working as a detective; a compulsive gambler who's constantly in debt, he steals from his recently widowed mother who, in turn, looks with cold clarity at her own lifelong disappointments. When a typhoon strikes, the whole family is stuck in the eldery woman's cramped apartment, and long-stifled emotions rise to the surface.
With his usual bittersweet poise, Kore-eda looks at how one failed relationship can affect all the others around it, and wonders if we ever really cast off our childhood attitudes.