Shara

A child disappears in the narrow lanes of Nara and is never found. The film picks up years later: the surviving brother has grown, the family still does not speak about it, and the town's Basara festival is approaching. Naomi Kawase works in her own home region with a handheld camera, non-professional performers and long takes. The festival is the centre of the picture, shot with real participants, real rain and roughly ten unbroken minutes of dancing, and there Kawase deliberately erases the line between fiction and documentary. Grief here is not an event but a kind of weather mixed into the rhythm of the town. It competed at Cannes in 2003. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese independent cinema and slow observational storytelling. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for explanation, because the missing child's fate is not the subject.