Gukoroku - Traces of Sin

A year ago a perfect family was killed in their own house: a successful businessman, his beautiful wife and their small child. The case was never closed and nobody was caught. Tanaka, a magazine reporter, reopens it and works through everyone who knew them. At the same time his younger sister Mitsuko has been arrested, and he is trying to hold her, and himself, together. As the interviews accumulate, what comes out is how that perfect family was assembled in the first place: the social ranks of a private university, who used whom, who was allowed not to be seen. Kei Ishikawa shoots it less as a murder puzzle than as an X-ray of a society. Satoshi Tsumabuki and Hikari Mitsushima play it, and the film screened at Venice.