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To the Ends of the Earth (Tabi no Owari Sekai no Hajimari)

NAME OF FILM: TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (TABI NO OWARI SEKAI NO HAJIMARI)

DIRECTOR(S): Kiyoshi Kurosawa

STARRING: Tokio Emoto, Ryo Kase, Atsuko Maeda

GENRE: Drama Film

SYNOPSIS: For more than two decades, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been at the artistic forefront of Japanese cinema, bending the form to his own singular, internalized rhythms in such films as Cure, Pulse, and Tokyo Sonata (NYFF46). His latest is no exception, an unexpected narrative following Yoko (former J-pop idol Atsuko Maeda), a television host whose trip to Uzbekistan to shoot an episode of her reality travel show begins to dissolve her chipper persona, revealing the paranoia and dislocation beneath. Filled with absurdly humorous set pieces, and climaxing with a cathartic burst unprecedented in Kurosawa’s oeuvre, To the Ends of the Earth is both an entertaining tale of culture clash and a penetrating depiction of a young woman’s alienation and anxiety that pushes the director’s craft into new, mysterious, and enormously emotional realms.