New Kore-eda film?

[Aaron Gerow]

>So the collective memory is an amalgam of Aum and Asama Sanso? Or is memory
>here something personal (ficticious) and not referencing history?

Clearly there is an assumed spectatorship what will reference those 
events, but the film itself mentions specifically neither Aum nor Asama 
Sanso.  The memories in the film are purely personal: first, in the sense 
that they mostly do not interconnect between people (again, this is in 
part the distance of the title); and second, in the sense that at least 
narratively there is no real collective accumulation among the characters 
(while there is some conversation about the past, the actual memories we 
see are never told to others).  At best, the spectator can do such 
connections, but one wonders how much this escapes the personal.

This is different from After Life in which the collation of memory was 
done through conversation and then reenacted in a collective process.  
Even if these reenactments were kind of "fake," it was in part this 
collectivity that made them to Koreeda more "documentary" than the video 
"recordings" of people's lives. Here fiction can be documentary if it has 
emotional and communal investment.

Yet in Distance, much of that seems to be missing.  There are some 
memories that seem to be "constructed" through an interaction with 
others, but what kind of "documents" are those?  More things to ask 
Koreeda...

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171