More from the 9th Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival: Ginger and Cinnamon, I Am Emma and I Like to Work. KIM LESCH, MIA V and DAVID LEVINSON review.

At the 9th Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival, TIM WONG sampled the middle class hell of Gabriele Muccino's Remember Me, followed by Sleepless, the latest in cold-blooded giallo from Dario Argento.

Reviewed by Kunal D'Souza

I HAVE been asked in one of those getting-to-know-you e-mail questionnaires, to name a time and place where I'd like to have lived in, given the choice. Paris, 1968, is almost certainly close to the top of my list.

The Paris of Cahiers du Cinéma, the French new wave, Eustache, Godard, Mai-68 demonstrators and pro-change revolutionaries. When, therefore, I heard about this film, which purported to pay homage to the late 1960s cinema scene in Paris, it was a film decidedly anticipated.

This ambiguous, saddening meditation on grief, loss and recovery is filmmaker Hirozaku Kore-eda's third prominent feature after Mabaroshi and Afterlife; his latest, Nobody Knows, played recently to New Zealand Film Festival audiences. Not too dissimilar from Shinji Aoyama's equally moving and slightly more pronounced Eureka, the "distance" in this film is one of dislocation, much more so than that other Sophia Coppola movie, and unintentionally presents a sort of an internalised reflection on sudden and unexpected tragedy, ostensibly in relation to 9/11.