Nanayo

Naomi Kawase's film opens with Saiko travelling from Japan to Thailand. Understanding what the driver of the taxi she has taken from the airport intends, she jumps out and finds herself in the middle of a road, in a place whose language she does not speak. The people she meets after that become the real subject, Greg above all. Kawase builds no conventional plot, tying the narrative instead to nature, to water, to forest and to the state of a body in those places. It proceeds through touch, walking and waiting rather than through speech. The title points to seven nights and the film keeps to that span. Kyoko Hasegawa and Grégoire Colin are in the cast, in one of the rare films Kawase shot outside Japan.