Star actress Juliette Binoche has a face so expressive that it can mirror strong emotions and dramatic events with the slightest movement. In Naomi Kawase’s feature film Vision she proves her abilities to the fullest. Binoche plays Jeanne, a French woman who travels to Japan in search of a forest herb that can cure all kinds of human pain. At least this is what she tells the people that she meets, all of whom live in and around a forest previously inhabited by a community of herb gatherers.

Tomo, a forester, watches the newcomer with mild scepticism. The old, blind woman Aki reacts with glowing enthusiasm, convinced that Jeanne’s arrival signals upheaval and radical change. Which is precisely the case.

As always in Kawase’s films, the interaction between humans and nature is key. The images of the forest in Vision are remarkable for their beauty and glowing warmth, but also for their enigmatic, almost spiritual quality. That “vision” is the name not only of the film, but also of the mystical herb itself, is of not a coincidence: this is a film about opening one’s eyes to the world. Moreover, for Jeanne, Tomo and Aki alike, the power of healing seems to lie in the realisation that past and present, body and soul, life and death, are inseparable.

Naomi Kawase (b. 1969) is one of Japan's foremost living directors. She started as a documentarian, but went on to direct a series of feature films in which people's relationship to nature and to their families are core themes. Many of her films have screened in Cannes, including Suzaku which won the Camera d'Or for best first feature in 1997, and The Mourning Forest which was awarded the Grand Prix ten years later.