Pieta in the Toilet

Hiroshi has given up on becoming a painter and gets by cleaning office windows. He collapses at work and learns in hospital that he has three months left. He meets Mai, a high school student, in the waiting room and pays her to play his sister; what forms between them is both an arrangement and, after a point, a real attachment. It is the first fiction feature by Daishi Matsunaga, who was known as a documentary maker. The starting point of the screenplay was a page from the diary Osamu Tezuka kept in his final days. Rather than reducing illness to dramatic material, the film looks at how the time left gets filled. The musician Yojiro Noda plays Hiroshi and Hana Sugisaki plays Mai. It opened in June 2015.