Tokyo Sonata

Director : Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Country : Japan/The Netherlands/Hong Kong, China
Running Time: 119 mins.

Loyal salaryman Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his job when his company begins outsourcing to China. Incapable of facing the tragedy of his new reality, he hides his failure from his family and, weaving an intricate web of lies, pretends to have kept his job. As it turns out, he is not alone in this deception. At home, he tries to maintain the normal routine, though it soon becomes clear that this family has tragically lost touch with one another. His wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) attends to her chores and keeps up with their two boys, rebellious college-age Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) and quiet, younger Kenji (Kai Inowaki). However, nothing feels or looks the same for Ryuhei, who has lost his honour and his place in society. Kenji's simple request for extra money to take piano lessons however tips the balance of their artificially sustained family stability, pushing it over a ruinous precipice of unforeseeable external events.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa was born in Kobe, Japan, and studied sociology at Rikkyo University. He studied the art of filmmaking under Kazuhiko Hasegawa and Shinji Somai. He made his directorial feature debut in 1983 with Kandagawa Wars, and won a Sundance Institute Scholarship in 1992 for his original screenplay Charisma. Kurosawa was the featured director in the Festival's Spotlight programme in 1999. His films include The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl (85), Eyes of the Spider (97), Serpent's Path (97), Cure (98), License to Live (99), Barren Illusion (99), Charisma (99), Séance (00), Pulse (01), Bright Future (03), Doppelganger (03), Loft (05), Retribution (06) and Tokyo Sonata (08).

Rating : 8.0/10