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Yu Kajino returns with another experimental feature with “A Weather Report.” Having previously directed “Ahum,” the director has an established artistic admiration for ambiance and melancholy, which is very prominent in his newest project. Here, Kajino aims for a more story-centered road film. Yet, the final product is a major case of style over substance that could have balanced character drama.

A Weather Report is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival

Storywise, 18-year-old high school graduate Hikari travels alone from Niigata to Tokyo to meet her father, Naohide, for the first time. Years prior, Naohide had met Mayumi, Hikari's mother, in Shinjuku, where they fell in love, and she got pregnant. Yet, things didn't turn out well, and her mom was left to raise the child alone while the father left the picture to enter a new relationship and pursue a career as a screenwriter, earning acclaim for a successful J-drama.

The Japanese selection of Skip City International D-Cinema 2023, despite the fact that the diversity in terms of selection was significant, proved, essentially, the obvious. When Japanese filmmakers try to follow the recipes of the festival-favorite local directors the result is films that are either repetitive, or dull, or both, and most of the times much worse than the works of the aforementioned, with the lack of tension in particular bordering on the rather annoying. However, when they let their imagination free, both in terms of context and cinematic techniques, the result is surprisingly good, definitely in terms of the former, but frequently also of the latter. In that fashion, and considering the fact that I did not manage to watch every film, the ones that stood out where “My Mother's Eyes”, “Alien's Daydream”, and “Don't Go”

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1. Film Review: My Mother's Eyes (2023) by...

One of the winners of this year's Skip City International D-Cinema Festival is Kazuomi Makita's “Hierophanie”, an intimate drama about grief and the feeling of helplessness as we watch people's lives crumble. The director has been invited to the festival several times, with his short features “Point of the Love”, “Time Will Tell” and “The Birth”, making “Hierophanie” his first long feature. While many of the themes his movie deals with are more or less stables within the Japanese indie community, there is something quite special about his approach in terms of storytelling and visuals which makes “Hierophanie” stand out.

Hierophanie is screening at Skip City International D-Cinema Festival

After the suicide of her daughter, Shiori (Kayo Ise) quits her job as a therapist to work as a counselor at the local library. However, helping others dealing with their problems and trying to find solutions for them does not help her,...