North American Premiere
Naoko Ogigami, director of VIFF 2017 favorite Close-Knit, returns to the festival with a gentle comedy/drama about second chances and the transformative power of friendship.
Riverside Mukolitta stars Kenichi Matsuyama as Yamada, an ex-con trying to come to terms with the death of his estranged father. In an attempt to make a fresh start, Yamada moves to a small fishing town and finds work processing dried squid. Helping him get back on his feet, Yamada’s manager finds him a place to live in an old apartment building populated by a motley group of misfits. Holding this community together is Shiori (Hikari Mitsushima), the landlady harbouring her own tragic past. How can healing happen in such an odd place?
Based on Ogigami’s own 2019 novel, Riverside Mukolitta approaches the topic of mortality with reassuring simplicity and a dry, quirky sense of humor, taking the audience along with Yamada as he discovers that life’s sorrows and burdens are easier to bear with kindred spirits to help you bear them.
Media Partner
Kenichi Matsuyama, Tsuyoshi Muro, Hikari Mitsushima, Noriko Eguchi, Daisuke Kuroda, Toshiaki Chiku
Japan
2021
In Japanese with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Graduate
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blur: To the End
Now in their late 50s, Britpopsters blur (of Song 2 fame) do a celebratory lap of Great Britain culminating in their first ever Wembley Stadium show in this appealing observational doc. A companion piece to the concert film Live at Wembley Stadium.
Midnight Cowboy
Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are street hustlers on different ends of the innocence / experience spectrum who establish something more than a business partnership in the seedy world of late 60s New York City in John Schlesinger's New Hollywood classic.
Sinners
This year's unexpected box office sleeper is that rare beast, a genre movie full of bold invention and surprise. We are in Mississippi in the early 1930s, and the opening of a new blues joint on the edge of town is the signal for all hell to break out.
The Headless Woman
The pictures tell the story -- and you better not blink -- when Veronica (the superb Maria Onetto) hits something on the road home. But what? She is too traumatized, or panic-stricken, to go back and look, and her fears are too terrible to acknowledge.
Credits
Executive Producer
Daiji Horiuchi, Tsuyoshi Goroh, Shinichi Tago, Kazuo Nakanishi, Yumiko Masuda, Nobuo Kameyama, Riki Takeuchi, Junji Igarashi, Takayuki Suzuki, Misaki Kawamura,Osamu Nakanishi, Nobuo Komazawa
Producer
Ryoko Nozoe, Takuro Nagai, Shintaro Hori
Screenwriter
Naoko Ogigami
Cinematography
Hiroki Ando
Editor
Shinichi Fushima
Original Music
PASCALS
Art Director
Mayumi Tomita
Director
Naoko Ogigami
Naoko Ogigami was born in Japan and studied film at the University of Southern California. Her directorial debut, Yoshino’s Barber Shop (2004), received a Special Mention at the Kinderfilmfest at the Berlin International Film Festival. Her fourth film, Glasses (2007), received the Manfred Salzgeber Award, also at the Berlinale. Her 2017 film Close-Knit received awards at different film festivals, including the Teddy Jury Award at the Berlinale. She wrote for the stop-motion animation series Rilakkuma and Kaoru, which premiered on Netflix in 2019.
Filmography: Yoshino’s Barber Shop (2003); Glasses (2007); Rent-a-Cat (2012); Close-Knit (2017)