Manazuru — Hiromi Kawakami

Startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future.

Twelve years have passed since Kei's husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her threeâ€"yearâ€"old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man -- the antithesis of Rei -- has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something.

Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory -- a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members.