This film was released on Friday 20th February 2015 and is no longer screening.

Office worker Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, Babel) leads a melancholy existence in Tokyo, forcefully encouraged by her boss to move on, harangued by her mother for being unmarried and childless, and friendless but for her rabbit. Painfully shy and withdrawn, Kumiko obsesses over a videotape of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996), watching repeatedly the scene in which Steve Buscemi buries a briefcase of money by the side of the road. Fooled by the film’s claim to be based on a true story, and believing she knows the location of the briefcase, she travels to Minnesota on a quixotic quest, hindered and helped by the people she meets along the way, most notably a kindly police officer (director David Zellner).

Kikuchi is superb as the mumbling, bedraggled Kumiko, endearing a difficult character to the audience in an eccentric fairy tale. (Notes by Kevin Coyne.)

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