Love Life

Kôji Fukada was nominated for best film at last year's Venice Film Festival for his best film in ten years, with a painful but surprisingly funny film about loss, grief and love.

A fine-tuned and moving drama on par with Hirokazu Koreeda's best films, which were nominated for the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival. Taeko lives a harmonious life with her husband and her son from a previous relationship, in an apartment in Tokyo. When a horrific accident takes place, the child's father slowly re-enters her life. After all, only she can understand this deaf and homeless man, and help him deal with years of grief and guilt. Director Kôji Fukada is a master at depicting all the small details of human relationships, and as Dag Johan Haugerud does so well in his films, he manages to make room for small humorous scenes in really serious and sad situations.

«It is a movie whose gentleness and sadness coexist with a strange sense of the absurd, preposterous and tasteless new twists that life can give you: a film to remind you, perhaps, of George Bernard Shaw’s dictum: “Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” It is a rich, varied meal of a film»
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian –

Jon Sæter

Director

Kôji Fukada (b. 1980) is a Japanese director and screenwriter. One of his biggest sources of inspiration is Eric Rohmer, and as a student at the film school in Tokyo he had Kiyoshi Kurosawa as a lecturer. His films have been shown at the film festivals in Cannes, Venice and Tromsø, among others.

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