To Walk Beside You

In 2008, this festival showed the first four features made by the young director Ishii Yuya at a high tempo. In the meantime his tempo has returned to normal; this is his first work since. Again, serious subjects are driven to absurdity. The suicide attempt of 17-year-old Norio, for instance: he plucks up courage to jump in the river when two classmates, with a kind of porn doll under their arms without head or upper body, wave at him without extending a hand. No: then maybe his teacher Akemi. She offers him another way out: flee to Tokyo, study very hard and become a lawyer. She pays, but in the meantime secretly has to work hard to pay the costs. It's a pity that Norio is not a real student. He prefers to spend his day with an orphaned kid who confuses him with a famous baseball player. A tragicomedy in which all parent child relationships are disrupted and even the Platonic love between Norio and Akemi can't be maintained.