Moving (Shinji Sômai, 1993)

September 6, 2024 7:00pm

Location: Rubenstein Arts Center Film Theater

Moving [Ohikkoshi]
(Shinji Sômai, 1993 (restored 2023), 125 min, Japan, Japanese with English subtitles, DCP)

When her parents split and her father Kenichi moves out of their family home, Renko (Tomoko Tabata), a bright and energetic 6th grade girl, is left alone with her mother, Nazuna, in Kyoto. As Nazuna sets out new rules for their life together, Renko makes plans of her own, and sees to it that any changes happening in her family happen on her terms.

Since its premiere at Cannes in Un Certain Regard in 1993, Moving has been one Shinji Somai’s most beloved films.

Winner of the Venice Classics Award for Best Restored Film at the 2023 Venice Film Festival

"Critic Shigehiko Hasumi once suggested that Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai – who died young aged 53 in 2001, after directing 13 features – 'is the missing link between the end of the studio system of Japan and the rise of independent filmmaking'. In their compassionate depictions of loneliness and alienation, you can certainly see the influence of Somai’s films in the works of several younger directors who followed, including Shunji Iwai (All About Lily Chou-Chou) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse).

... [In Moving,] the domestic drama morphs into something altogether more elemental and abstract in its incredible final half hour, set around a countryside fire festival. Although most of Somai’s film narratives are told in a linear fashion, there’s a degree to which they all play with the concept of time in some way. Temporality combined with the surrealistic bending of reality and memory is key to much of Somai’s work."

– Josh Slater-Williams, BFI

"Since his debut in 1980, Shinji Somai is held in the highest esteem by Japanese film fans, just as it is, let's face it, impossible for anyone making cinema in Japan today not to have Somai in mind.

... [In Moving, lead actress Tomoko Tabata's] ability to move, the expression on her face, her eyes - everything is incredible; but it is her voice that I find most captivating. This voice, which alone manages to express her whole being, which plays with distance and time as if it were breaking down all boundaries, to touch and shake the adults who play the other characters, right up to the audience. As a filmmaker, it's hard to believe that such a being could exist in a film. The images are like so much evidence of her vital energy. We are led to reflect on the fact that the life force residing there may also be in us, and we may not be making full use of it. Life, here reinstilled."

– Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist), from “The World Doesn’t Know Shinji Somai”