Screen/Society--Cine-East Series--"Sketches of Kaitan City"

SKETCHES OF KAITAN CITY (Kumakiri Kazuyoshi, 2010, 152 min, Japan, Japanese with English subtitles, Color, DVD) -- Concealing its heavy-heart with the lightness of a sigh, Kumakiri Kazuyoshi's SKETCHES OF KAITAN CITY peruses the downhill slide of ordinary lives in a northern industrial town in recession. In the fictional Hokkaido shipbuilding town of Kaitan, local residents - mostly working-class stiffs for whom Japan's postwar economic miracle never really happened - find that, in addition to another harsh winter, they must also face the downsizing of the town's key industry due to depressed economic conditions. Despite being an adaptation of an anthology of short stories by the late Yasushi Sato (a contemporary of Haruki Murakami), SKETCHES OF KAITAN CITY relies less on words and a literary structure than a large mosaic of dramatically-subdued, but richly textured images.