Cottontail

Shoplifters star Lily Franky dominates this UK-Japan coproduction, written and directed by Patrick Dickinson. Franky plays Kenzaburo, a widower still deeply traumatized by his wife’s passing. In her will, she has requested that he and their (grown) son, Toshi, scatter her ashes in Lake Windermere, England, a place she loved as a child but was never able to revisit with her husband. If she imagined the pilgrimmage would unite father and son she reckoned without Kenzaburo’s propensity for reckless and pig-headed behaviour… Despite his minimal command of English, the widower sets out on his own and is soon lost in the countryside hundreds of miles from his destination.

Dickinson — who picked up the award for Best First Feature at the Rome Film Festival last fall — is working in the idiom of gentle character drama perfected by Koreeda Hirokazu, and his style is similarly attentive and unforced, while Franky rewards him with a memorable and complex performance.

Franky brings a great deal of rumpled, wounded charm to Kenzaburo. He has the ability to suggest someone who has been knocked off balance and is woozily making his way through the world, sifting through memories of the past.

Allan Hunter, Screen International

A sweet and warm piece of cinema.

Marko Stojiljković, Asian Movie Pulse