Playback

Director: Sho Miyake

2012 / 113min / DCP

On the edge of his 40th birthday Haji (Jun Murakami), an actor haunted by dreams of his own death, accepts an invitation from an old friend to revisit his hometown for a wedding—only to doze off en route and wake to find himself in the school uniform of his youth, seemingly catapulted back into the past. A remarkably mature, circumspect depiction of middle-age morass and melancholia from a director who was only in his mid-twenties when he made it, Playback’s premiere at the 2012 Locarno Film Festival established Miyake as a filmmaker to watch. A work of bold experimentation and teasing ambiguity, described by his friend Ryusuke Hamaguchi as “like a modern-day reincarnation of [John Cassavetes’s] Opening Night.”

Distributor: Kani Releasing

Part of Unspoken Gestures: The Films of Sho Miyake