River's Edge

Tokyo, 1994. In a video interview a young woman discusses the significance of a teddy bear. Shortly afterwards, a burning object falls from a high-rise building at night. A young man, naked and bound, falls out of a locker. Two fisherman talk about a water spirit. In his unusual drama River’s Edge Isao Yukisada lays many trails and jumps as abruptly and unpredictably between the various narrative threads as do his characters: Ichiro is gay; he is preyed upon by his violent fellow pupils but seems to draw strength from his injuries. He makes a gruesome discovery at a nearby river polluted by industrial waste and shows it to his best friend, a girl named Haruna. Kannonzaki loves rough sex and in the course of it transgresses more and more boundaries. An introverted girl obsessively reads her pregnant sister’s diaries and Kozue, a model with bulimia, buries herself in mountains of food at night. All these and other stories are brilliantly interwoven into a breathless social portrait of a driven but apparently lost generation and their seemingly unavoidable encounters with violence.

details

  • Runtime

    118.0 min
  • Country

    Japan
  • Year of Presentation

    2018
  • Year of Production

    2018
  • Director

    Isao Yukisada
  • Cast

  • Production Company

  • Berlinale Section

    Panorama
  • Berlinale Category

    Feature Film

Biography Isao Yukisada

sao Yukisada was born in Kumamoto in 1968. He first worked as an assistant director on Shunji Iwai’s films LOVE LETTER and SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY and then, in 1998, for Seiichi Tanabe on his film, DOG FOOD. Ever since his tragedy, HIMAWARI/SUNFLOWER, which received the international critics’ award at Pusan International Festival in 2000, he has come to be regarded as one of the up and coming talents of Japanese cinema. He contributed to the video series, “Love Cinema” with a piece entitled TOJIRU HI/ENCLOSED PAIN, screened at Locarno 2001. GO (2001) was Japan’s selection to the Foreign Language Oscars.
His latest film PARADE won the Fipresci Prize at the 60th Berlinale.