THE TALE OF IYA at the GFT

Demand to see this film was so popular it had to be shifted to the largest cinema at short notice.



Director Tetsuichiro Tsuta  and Cinematographer Yutaka Aoki were on hand to take a Q&A after the screening.

This review from The Telegraph gives a gushing appraisal for the young director who has brought to the screen a very sophisticated theme capturing the alienation , emptiness and angst of being a young modern Japanese looking to find a rounded sense of the technological age.

 "This is a work of instant and startling brilliance: a novelistic, heart-bursting elegy to wildness – and when words like "wildness", "hidden" and "Japan" are mentioned, the names of Shohei Imamura and Kaneto Shindo can hardly be far behind them. Tsuta’s picture, shot with a sunburnt vividness on 35mm film stock, certainly owes a debt to Japanese New Wave works such as The Naked Island and The Ballad of Narayama, but it feels less like the work of a fan than an apprentice."

The film has a long middle in which characters walk from one corner of the screen to the other in various states of detachment from their faculties , but when we finally get to the point  we see that it was necessary to show the lack of substantial depth of stability of the newer generation as compared the the old , generous , chivalrous values of the elders still attached to the old samurai order code rooted to the Family , community and closeness to the land.