Renoir

Synopsis

Suburban Tokyo, 1987. Imaginative eleven-year-old Fuki begins her summer break lonely and adrift – her kind, terminally ill father has landed once again in the hospital and her mother, distracted by the inevitability of his diagnosis, hasn’t much time for her daughter. Fuki responds to the situation not with tears but with placid curiosity about the prospect of death – becoming fascinated by the occult and experimenting with hypnotism. As the summer passes, Fuki encounters a string of lonely, imperfect adults, all of whom nudge her closer to an emotional truth she isn't quite ready to name yet.

Chie Hayakawa’s sophomore feature is a tender, often unsettling portrait of childhood grief and the sinuous imagination of an inquisitive young girl. Led by transfixing newcomer Yui Suzuki, RENOIR “delicately articulates the girl’s inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season,” (IndieWire) and “steps to a delicate rhythm whose echo isn’t heard until the very end” (RogerEbert.com).

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