Survival Family

One morning the power goes out. Not only at home; in the city, in the country and, it seems, everywhere. Nothing electrical will start: telephones, trains, cars, water pumps, hospitals. The Suzuki family lives in Tokyo; a father, a mother and two teenagers. They wait a few days, then see there is no food left in the city. They decide: they will go to Kagoshima, where the mother's family lives. It is more than a thousand kilometres and the only transport is bicycles. Shinobu Yaguchi writes and directs. Fumiyo Kohinata and Eri Fukatsu are in the cast. The form is not disaster but comedy; the narrative shows not panic but incompetence. The matter it builds is lost knowledge; nobody knows how to find water, kill an animal or find their direction. The father is at the centre and the film builds him as a man who keeps deciding wrongly; the family follows him anyway. Preparedness for natural disaster is a common subject in Japan and the film takes it up directly as a question. The people met along the way make the sections of the narrative; each meeting shows another way of surviving. Its limit is length; the journey stretches in the second half and the jokes begin to repeat. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese comedy and survival narratives. Who it is not for: the humour is light, the sense of danger low, and the ending too tidy.