A Hundred Flowers - HYAKKA

One New Year’s Eve, Izumi finds his mother Yuriko wandering around a park in the freezing cold. A few months later she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and her memory quickly declines. For her son, the memories of the mother who brought him up on her own are still just as vivid as ever. One of them in particular, when he thought that she had disappeared, haunts him terribly. While Yuriko sinks slowly into oblivion, Izumo has to come to terms with losing his mother again, this time forever. As he is caring for his mother - when he himself is about to become a father - Izumi tries to understand what came between them and questions the meaning of their relationship, so that he can reconnect with the essence of what remains to them.

“Seven years ago, my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease and in concrete terms, she completely forgot who I was. For me, it was such a terrible shock that I didn’t know what to do. To deal with the grief, the worry, all these feelings, I chose to write a novel to try and get around my grandmother’s level of perception while she was in the throes of this illness, then I decided to adapt it to film.” Genki Kawamura