Renoir

A tender, Palme d’Or-nominated portrait of 1980s Tokyo, capturing an eleven-year-old girl’s grief and isolation with psychological depth and impressionistic grace.

After the award-winning dystopian drama Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa now turns her gaze to the past in a deeply personal story set in 1987. Eleven-year-old Fuki finds herself in the fragile space between childhood and adolescence, while her father is gravely ill and her mother barely has the strength to carry her own worry. Fuki escapes into fantasy and the supernatural, experiments with hypnosis, calls a dating hotline, and puts herself in increasingly risky situations. A beautiful, elegiac depiction of a young girl’s inner world, in which a Renoir painting also carries symbolic weight.

• Johan Blomqvist