Radiance

In Japanese maestro Kawase Naomi’s elegant films (The Mourning Forest, 2007; An, 2015) simple people learn to accept an existential loss, finding comfort in the beauty of nature. This time, the protagonist is young Misako (Ayame Misaki), who is struggling with her mother’s progressive dementia. Her job is writing audio descriptions – film descriptions providing a visual impression to be read aloud, as a supplement to the film’s audio track, for blind and visually impaired cinema visitors.

The harshest criticaster in the expert panel that comments on her description of the film-within-the-film ‘Radiance’ is an almost blind, embittered photographer (Masatoshi Nagase). What is Misako really trying to describe? And what does this say about her world view? Both characters feel their way towards a sense of solidity and beauty in a transient world. Because, as someone comments in Radiance: "Nothing is more beautiful than what disappears before our eyes."