Issue:
August 2025
Join the Film Committee …
Join us on Wednesday, August 20 at 6 pm for a sneak preview of Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills, a visually lush, richly textured, emotionally precise meditation on war, loss and memory. Adapting Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s haunting 1982 debut novel of the same name, Ishikawa (Gukoroku: Traces of Sin, A Man) captures the ways in which trauma is inherited—across decades, oceans and self-imposed silence. Straddling two timelines—post-war Nagasaki in the 1950s and England in the early 1980s—the story unfolds as Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), a Japanese woman living in the British countryside, and her aspiring-author daughter, Niki (Camilla Aiko), pack up their home in preparation for a move. Finding early photos of her mother, Niki prods her about the past. Gradually, Etsuko begins to recall the optimistic mood in Nagasaki as it was recovering from the bombing. As a young wife, Etsuko (now played by Suzu Hirose) leads a quiet life, until she befriends a mysterious single mother named Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido) and her troubled daughter. Sachiko dreams of moving to America, and her enthusiasm is seductive. A Pale View of Hills marks the first screen adaptation of Ishiguro’s work by a Japanese director, and Ishiguro himself served as executive producer. The international co-production received a heralded world premiere in the 2025 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section. The director will join us for the Q&A session after the screening. (A Pale View of Hills, Japan/UK/Poland, 2025, 123 minutes, in Japanese, English with English and Japanese subtitles).
