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.

The film traces four unlikely friends brought together by a mass terrorist act – each related to perpetrators in the crime (all members of a religious sect). On the anniversary of the massacre, the group make a pilgrimage to an isolated lake of significance, something of a gesture to remember their loved ones, but also a compulsion that neither of them are entirely sure of. The friends then encounter a man – the only surviving member of the sect – seemingly provoking a greater sense of healing and transcendence, breaking the stagnant mould of their well-intended but indefinable ritual. The result is both profound and ultimately elusive.—Tim Wong

» Hirozaku Kore-eda | Japan | 2001