SCREENING MAY 12TH

Corry (Vicky Krieps), a French expert in pediatric heart transplant, is sent to the Kobe transplant center in Japan – an assignment weighted with cultural complexity. Organ donation remains a deeply taboo and sensitive subject there, rooted in beliefs about the soul’s continued presence in the body after clinical death. While visiting Yakushima’s ancient forest, she meets Jin (Kanichiro), a free-spirited photographer, and the two fall for each other. One day Jin vanishes – is he dead, or one of Japan’s so-called Jōhatsu, people who disappear overnight to escape their former lives? Naomi Kawase’s new film (Vision, EAFFI 2020) is a luminous meditation on loss, connection, and the ephemeral nature of being.

Notes by Marie-Pierre Richard