INCINERATOR

A word from the selection committee  :

As the school year draws to a close, the cicadas are already droning, and the young ten-year-old Kozue is drifting about, her body languid and dreamy, neither here nor there – a strange, indeterminate space-time of still latent adolescence that Shuntaro Uchida’s film unfolds with remarkable consistency. 

It is 1995, but this slight leap back in time is above all a matter of light, a relationship to time, which runs counter to the usual visual signaling. Only one clue: the school incinerator (they have since disappeared), into which Kozue likes to throw objects she has stolen. An older young man, who has come to perform a shadow play in her classroom, grabs her interest and triggers a seismic internal shift. The event also marks, on screen, an actress coming into her own: throughout the film, the astounding young actress Karin compels us to decipher opaque feelings alongside her, and to invent a child’s mood. Sealed-off and secretive stirrings, in which we observe, wait, and feel, while the imagination runs wild; the childhood portrayed in Incinerator, which may seem lonely and troubled, is also eccentric, passionate, utterly swept up in the kinds of adventures that are its own and through which it encounters the world.