A Man

A woman loses her husband in a workplace accident. After the funeral the dead man's elder brother comes, looks at the photograph and says this is not his brother. The woman does not know who the man she lived with for four years was. The lawyer Kido starts looking. The name the man used belongs to somebody else. That somebody else had given his own name away too. As Kido follows the trail he looks at his own life; he is a Japanese man of Korean descent and has spent years being asked about it. Kei Ishikawa directs. The film is adapted from a novel by Keiichiro Hirano. Satoshi Tsumabuki, Sakura Ando, Masataka Kubota and Hidetoshi Nishijima are in the cast. It is a Japanese production. The film screened in the Horizons section of the 2022 Venice Film Festival. It won eight prizes at the Japan Academy Film Prize including best picture and best director; Tsumabuki took best actor, Kubota best supporting actor and Ando best supporting actress. The matter it treats is whether an identity can be handed over; names change hands in the film and a past becomes something that can be sold. The narrative deals directly with the position of the Korean minority in Japan. It starts like a detective story but does not settle its question by finding a culprit. The narrative opens the dead man's past slowly and every opening makes the question larger. It keeps the woman's grief alive throughout and does not make her only a starting point. The ending turns back to the lawyer's own identity. Its limit is structure; the narrative carries two stories at once, the pace is slow, and some threads are left open. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese drama and mysteries about identity. Who it is not for: it is slow, branching, and the ending unresolved.