There was a Father - CHICHI ARIKI

Pitch

In a provincial town, Shuhei Horikawa, a widowed teacher, leads an unpretentious life with Ryohei, his only son. During a school trip, a pupil drowns in a lake. Shuhei takes responsibility for the accident and decides to go back and live in the area he comes from. During the journey, father and son discuss life and their future. One day, Shuhei informs his son that he is to go away and study at boarding school, inexorably implying that they will be separated from each other. Some years later, the father is working in Tokyo, while the son has become a teacher in a provincial college like his father... They meet up in an inn...

“Father and son, continually filmed as if someone were looking up at them, keep looking upwards without fixing any particular point, which gives them a most vague and worried expression. Consequently, the father and son, who are supposed to be in dialogue, always seem to be pronouncing a monologue. In this relationship where father and son seem fiercely independent, the spectator finds no room for empathy, for a sharing of emotions.” Kiju Yoshida