Letter

17-year-old Sasaki Yusuke won the Grand Prix at this year's Image Forum Festival in Tokyo with this extraordinary and innovative DV feature. A school kid splits from his classmates and heads home for the evening. Around 9 pm, feeling `somehow lonely', he sends a neutral text-message to a friend. From this point, Letter shows nothing but the boy's phone, either sitting in its recharger or brought into close-up so that we can read incoming messages and watch the writing (sometimes rewriting) of messages to be sent. One (crucial) outgoing message is concealed from us until the end of the film. There are several edits, but most of the film is shot in real time, and the whole thing feels like real time. What makes this astonishing is that, despite the carefully judged formal and visual constraints, the film is psychologically revealing and emotionally gripping -a powerful drama, in fact. To discuss the content of the messages received and sent (mostly improvised, but within an agreed schema) would be to spoil the effect, but it's fair to say that Letter teases out truths about adolescent fears and desires with tremendous candour. (Tony Rayns)