Wednesday, March 25, 5:30 pm

Student Union Movie Theater, UNC Charlotte Main Campus

     Tale of Iya/Iya Monogatari: Okunohito          

Director Tsuta Tetsuichiro

Japan, 2013, 169 mins

In Japanese with English subtitles

 Sponsored by the Chancellor’s Diversity Challenge Fund, the Charlotte Film Society and the Nihon Club

Introduction by Shota Ogawa, Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese, and Tsuta Tetsuichiro, the director, writer, and editor of The Tale of Iya

An award winning film by a thirty-year old director, The Tale of Iya allegorically captures the post-Fukushima landscape where conflicts between man and nature, modernity and mythology, and realism and fantasy have resurfaced as an aesthetic concern. Haruna and her grandfather (played by the legendary dancer-actor Tanaka Min) live in a hermetic world of rural Tokushima, growing their own food and hunting in the forest. Change arrives with a young man from Tokyo, just as Haruna must decide whether to stay in the village or move to the city. Shot in the beautiful Iya Valley region, The Tale of Iya gracefully interweaves a personal story with breathtaking cinematography.

Reviews:

“a work of instant and startling brilliance: a novelistic, heart-bursting elegy to wildness …” – Robbie Collin, The Telegraph

“I was never visually less than entranced. Magic indeed…” – Mark Schilling, Japan Times

Clip: http://iyamonogatari.jp/contents/renewal-en.htm