Asia Society continues its ongoing monthly series titled Films to See Before You Die featuring classic films and underseen gems from across Asia and the Asian diaspora with extended introductions by Asia Society's Curator of Film. 

Suzaku 
Naomi Kawase, Japan, 1997, 35mm, 95 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

Time moves like the clouds through the characters in Naomi Kawase’s ethereal film about a family’s life in a rural mountain town, which won the Camera d’Or prize for best debut feature at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. When awarding her with another prize for career achievement twelve years later, the festival praised her for “a cinema that explores the interstices and the boundaries and that oscillates between the possibilities of different worlds.”

Rustling leaves, steaming pots, a windchime’s gentle dance, these are the sensations that bring us into the world of the Taharas, a loving family nested in the mountainous Nishiyoshina region of Nara Prefecture. Three-year-old Michiru is attached-at-the-hip to her older cousin Eisuke, 11, who lives with her and her mother Yasuyo, father Kozo, and grandmother Sachiko, and the pair lead an idyllic, nature-filled childhood. The adults dote on them and allude to the harsher realities hiding offscreen. Debate stirs about the anticipated effects of a proposed railway line that would run through their town. An abrupt time-jump takes us fifteen years down the road; teenage Michiro is still infatuated with her cousin, who now works at a hotel. Yasuya is tired of being a housewife and asks Eisuke to get her a job there as well. Kozo and other men in the town are still arguing about the railway project, which has been canceled. The poetry of everyday life in the mountains persists, but a sudden tragedy upends the family and casts a pall of despair over their lives. With the discovery of some footage shot on a Super 8mm camera— a tender nod to Kawase’s earlier body of experimental, small gauge short-form films— the beauty of their world begins to re-assert itself. Imported 35mm print. 

A limited amount of complimentary tickets will be available to NYC college students with ID at the box office on the day of the screening.

This presentation at Asia Society is generously funded by the Pratt Foundation.