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NEW FILMS FROM JAPAN: YAMABUKI

Chang-su (Kang Yoon-soo) fights off loneliness and desperation in Juichiro Yamasaki’s Yamabuki

YAMABUKI (Juichiro Yamasaki, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, February 10, 7:00, and Saturday, February 11, 4:00
Series runs February 10-16, $17
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
yamabuki-film.com/en

“You have two options. Be prepared to die for what you believe or give up on it and run from it,” widowed detective Hayakawa (Yohta Kawase) tells his teenage daughter, Yamabuki (Kilala Inori), in Juichiro Yamasaki’s Yamabuki, making its US premiere February 10-11 at IFC as part of the sixth ACA Cinema Project series, “New Films from Japan.”

The first Japanese film selected for the ACID section at Cannes, Yamasaki’s third feature follows multiple characters as they struggle through the loneliness of everyday existence, their lives intertwining primarily at a crossroad intersection in a small town. It all takes place in Maniwa, where Yamasaki’s father was born and where Yamasaki is a tomato farmer in addition to being a writer and director.

Chang-su (Kang Yoon-soo) is a former Olympic equestrian who had to quit the sport when his father’s business collapsed. The South Korean native is now working in Japan for a construction company that shatters large rock formations in a mountain quarry; the resulting gravel will be used to build infrastructure for the Tokyo Olympics. The soft-spoken Chang-su lives with his girlfriend, Minami (Misa Wada), and her six-year-old daughter, Uzuki, whose father is out of the picture.

Yamabuki is a high school student who spends much of her time “silent standing” at the crossroad with a small group, holding signs protesting the 2015 military legislation change that permitted Japan to get involved in foreign conflicts even when not for self-defense. She is joined by Yusuke (Hisao Kurozumi), a classmate who is obsessed with her; while her sign reads, “Flowers in the rifle barrel! Peace in Okinawa!,” his declares, “I’m in love with this woman!” with an arrow pointing at her.

On one of his mountain hikes, Hayakawa spots a small yamabuki plant, also known as the Japanese rose, and decides to take it home and replant it in his garden. However, while doing so, he dislodges numerous large stones of the type Chang-su smashes, and, without Hayakawa’s knowledge, they tumble down onto the mountain road where Chang-su is driving, causing him to get into an accident and break his leg. Shortly thereafter, something else falls down the mountain that leads the many subplots to intersect even further (while also offering another meaning of the word “yamabuki”).

Yamabuki (Kilala Inori) is not sure of her place in the world in Juichiro Yamasaki’s third feature

Yamabuki is shot on 16mm film stock by cinematographer Kenta Tawara, giving the movie a grainy, nostalgic feel; if it weren’t for the cars and the occasional use of cell phones, you might think it was made in the 1970s, especially when Chang-su stops twice to use public pay phones. Composer Olivier Deparis’s toy piano score adds to the film’s wistfulness while Sébastien Laudenbach’s animation of blossoming yamabukis in the opening and closing credits are charming, bookending the pervading melancholia.

The Osaka-born Yamasaki (The Sound of Light, Sanchu Uprising: Voice at Dawn) — who was inspired to make the film not only by the Olympics but because of Kang Yoon-soo’s real life as a Korean actor who moved to Maniwa with a woman and her two children — takes his time with the narrative; scenes unfold slowly, often with not much happening and explanation kept at a minimum, left to visual and aural poetry. “Di tang grows in the shade, where people don’t look,” a prostitute says to Hayakawa about a tree she spots through a window, surrounded by garbage. “Sunflowers face the sun but you don’t have to,” Yamabuki recalls her mother telling her.

The final moments of the film turn surreal and can be interpreted in several different ways. Oddly, much of the scene is used in the official trailer, so anyone wanting to see the film should avoid that at all costs.

Yamabuki is screening February 10 at 7:00 and February 11 at 4:00, with Yamasaki on hand for Q&As at each show. The series continues through February 16 with Kei Ishikawa’s A Man, Shô Miyake’s Small, Slow, and Steady, Nao Kubota’s Thousand and One Nights, and Yuji Nakae’s The Zen Diary.

TANTURA

Teddy Katz listens to damning audiotapes about a 1948 massacre in Tantura

TANTURA (Alon Schwarz, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, December 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

There’s a deeply disturbing theme that runs through Alon Schwarz’s shocking, must-see documentary, Tantura, about one specific incident during what Palestinians refer to as Al Nakba, “the Catastrophe” that took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

In the late 1990s, a graduate student named Teddy Katz researched a possible Israeli army massacre that occurred in the Palestinian village of Tantura. When filmmaker Schwarz interviews members of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade about it, they smile and laugh as they either flat-out deny that such war crimes happened or basically tell Schwarz, so what if it did?

“In the War of Independence, we knew one simple thing: It’s either me or them,” Amitzur Cohen says. “What would I tell [my wife]? That I was a murderer?” he easily admits with a laugh. “If you killed, you did a good thing,” Hanoch Amit says with a smile. Henio-Tzvi Ben Moshe, head of the Alexandroni Veteran’s Association, lets out a disturbing laugh when he declares, “We’re done with Teddy Katz.”

In the late 1990s, for his master’s thesis at the University of Haifa, Katz interviewed 135 people about the massacre, compiling 140 hours of recordings about the Tantura atrocities, centered around the alleged cold-blooded murder of some two hundred Palestinians whose bodies were then dumped into a mass grave. He received a high grade on the paper, but it was soon submerged in controversy, resulting in a defamation lawsuit and claims that it was all a lie.

“You can take the tapes and listen to them, but if you want to make a movie out of it, be careful, because you’ll be hunted down like I was,” Katz tells Schwarz.

But that warning doesn’t deter Schwarz, who speaks with Alexandroni Brigade vets — who are now in their nineties — university professors, engineers, and Arabs who survived the massacre as he puts together what actually happened at Tantura and how Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion began the cover-up, which is still going on.

“My whole life I thought, and I still think, that the root of the disaster, including the part . . . that can be called the contamination, is 1948,” explains Katz, who was named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. “To this day the vast majority of what happened in 1948 is not only hushed up but also destroyed.”

Schwarz intercuts archival footage from the war — in which hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were demolished and some three quarters of a million refugees fled their homes — with scenes from a staged propaganda reenactment and clips of Ben-Gurion and the establishment of the State of Israel. As the evidence mounts, so does the refusal to acknowledge the Catastrophe.

“It’s forbidden to tell. I’m not going to talk about it . . . because . . . it could cause a huge scandal. I don’t want to talk about it,” brigade vet Yossef Diamant says. “That’s it. But it happened; what can you do? It happened. . . . [Katz] told the truth,” he adds with a dismissive laugh.

Casually sitting in a chair outside with a woman on either side of him, Mulik Sternberg proudly says, “The Arabs are an evil, cruel, vindictive enemy, but we were better, in battle. Always. . . . Of course we killed them. We killed them without remorse.” He is clearly unafraid of any possible repercussions.

Mustafa Masri, who lives in Fureidis, where many of the Tantura survivors were relocated, describes seeing the bodies of his murdered father and brother piled on a cart of victims. Professor Yoav Gelber comes right out and says, “I don’t believe witnesses.”

Professor Ilan Pappe puts it all in perspective when he says, “I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. How important it is to be exceptional. We are the Chosen People. This is part of the Israeli self-identification as a very superior moral people. . . . I think it’s very hard for Israelis to admit that they commit war crimes.”

Schwarz is an Israeli-born Jew who worked as a high-tech software entrepreneur before turning to documentaries, making Narco Cultura and Aida’s Secrets with his brother Shaul. Alon, who considers himself “a member of the moderate left side of Israel’s political system,” initially set out to make a film about young human rights activists who are trying to end the 1967 occupation and are labeled by many as traitors — much as Katz is. Schwarz stumbled on Katz’s dilemma by accident.

Documentary seeks to uncover the truth of what happened in Tantura in May 1948

Schwarz is no mere fly on the wall in the film but is actively investigating numerous aspects of the case, putting himself in the story. Tantura is reminiscent of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 The Act of Killing and 2014 follow-up, The Look of Silence, as the director confronts the perpetrators of the 1965–66 genocide in Indonesia, who are proud of what they did. It also recalls the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre led by US Lt. William Calley Jr. in Vietnam.

Katz, who has had three strokes and uses a motorized scooter to get around, is determined to not give up until justice wins out, despite all that’s happened to his career and his family. “You feel like the country is against you,” his wife, Ruth, tells Schwarz. But none of it might matter in the long run.

“What we remember are the good memories,” says Drora Varblovsky, one of four remaining original residents of Kibbutz Nachsholim, which was started in June 1948 on the former site of Tantura.

“Yes, exactly. I have only good memories,” Tereza Carmi adds. “Because I’m fed up with remembering bad things.”

Tantura opens at IFC on December 2, with Schwarz on hand for Q&As after the 7:50 shows on December 2 and 3.

VAMPIRE WEEKENDS: THIRST

Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is part of “Vampire Weekends” midnight series at IFC

THIRST (Park Chan-wook, 2009)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, October 14, and Saturday, October 15, midnight
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is a different kind of vampire movie. Inspired by Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, the creepy Korean flick stars Song Kang-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder) as Sang-hyun, a friendly priest who volunteers to participate in a dangerous experimental program that is attempting to develop a vaccine for a deadly virus. Unfortunately, he succumbs to the disease, his body covered in nasty boils, but he surprisingly arises, reborn, with a deep desire to suck some blood. However, he still is the same friendly priest with a moral soul, so he is unwilling to kill to fill his belly. As he gains superhuman strength, he grows closer to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the virtually imprisoned adopted sister / wife of a goofy childhood friend (Shin Ha-kyun) who is cared for by his doting mother (Kim Hae-sook). But as Sang-hyun and Tae-ju get hot and heavy — one particular sex scene is among the hottest in a good movie since Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue in 1986 — their thirst threatens to overwhelm them and everyone around them. Eschewing standard vampire lore — don’t look for garlic, crucifixes, bats, wooden stakes, or a Van Helsing-like character — Park (Joint Security Area, the Vengeance trilogy) examines the complex spirituality and sexuality of a man of the cross, a figure always dressed in black (reminiscent of Count Dracula) who is forced to challenge his faith and humanity. At 133 minutes, Thirst is a half hour too long, with several scenes that could have served as an ending, but hang in there; no one can tell a story like Park Chan-wook, even if he is an acquired taste — like, say, blood.

Thirst is screening at midnight on October 14 and 15 in the IFC Center series “Vampire Weekends,” consisting of half a dozen horror favorites being shown in conjunction with the release of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire on AMC/AMC+. The series continues through November 5 with Tony Scott’s The Hunger, Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk til Dawn, and Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned. Park’s latest film, Decision to Leave, which earned him Best Director honors at Cannes, was a selection of the sixtieth New York Film Festival and opens at Lincoln Center on October 19.

TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (REDUX)

A trio of nurses deal with a deadly epidemic in early Guy Maddin cult classic, Tales form the Gimli Hospital

TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (REDUX) (Guy Maddin, 1988/2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, October 14
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
zeitgeistfilms.com

In a 2011 twi-ny talk focusing on a “reframed” version of his 1988 debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Canadian director Guy Maddin said, “I thought, of all the films of mine that might actually thematically justify a revisiting from the director (something that truly ought not to be done under almost any circumstances!), then this was the title.” Well, Maddin has done it again with a 4K restoration of the film, which he is now calling Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Redux), featuring some trimming as well as the addition of a long-lost scene.

The Canadian DIY master reached into Icelandic sagas for the original, ultra-low-budget version. In many ways a kind of Scandinavian Frankenstein as if directed by Ingmar Bergman and George A. Romero, the mostly black-and-white Expressionist film is a story within a story (at times within another story) that an old woman, Amma (Margaret Anne MacLeod), is telling her grandchildren (Heather and David Neale) in a hospital room where their mother lies very ill. The dark, lurid fairy tale, set in “a Gimli we no longer know,” is about Einar the Lonely (assistant director Kyle McCulloch), a shy fish smoker who does not know how to relate to other people, particularly women. Felled by an epidemic, he is brought to the Gimli Hospital in Manitoba, where other men battle this dread disease, which leaves stitchlike scars on their face and body. Einar is discouraged that the patient in the bed next to him, the portly Gunnar (Michael Gottli), is treated much nicer by the nurses than he is, but he is helpless to do anything about it. Gunnar is soon telling Einar the story of his true love, Snjófridur (Angela Heck), a tragic tale with a surprising twist that brings everything full circle.

A unique visual stylist who regularly pays homage to the early days of cinema, Maddin, who directed and edited the picture (and wrote the script on Post-it Notes), purposely keeps things low-tech, including less-than-perfect sound dubbing and bumpy cuts, incorporating freak-show-like oddities alongside an ominous lo-fi soundtrack with old songs; Maddin (My Winnipeg, Careful) himself plays the weirdo surgeon who operates on Gunnar and Einar in rather strange fashion. The intentionally amateurish nature of the original work led to its being rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for ineptitude; it went on to become an instant cult classic, holding the midnight-movie slot at the Quad for nearly a year. In 2011, Maddin, who is part Icelandic, reimagined the film in the special Performa presentation Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed, a reedited version with a live score by Icelandic musicians. Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Redux), a 4K restoration that premiered at TIFF 2022, goes a few steps further.

“The new scene was shot in 1999 as an after-the-fact deleted scene as a way of celebrating a cast reunion after a serious car accident injured the actor Michael Gottli,” Maddin explains. “The act of shooting this scene was intended as a kind of rehab therapy for my dispirited thespian. But it turned out quite well, I think. It is inserted early on in the feature, during the scene in the hospital when a primitive Punch and Judy puppet show is deployed as an anesthetic distraction to a patient (Gottli) having his leg operated on by a man wielding a sickle. Such puppet shows were the only anesthetic available in the pioneer days of Gimli. The new scene suggests to the patient a hallucinated tale of gender transformation and some lusty BDSM involving yet another man with a fish net. I had promised Gottli I would insert this ‘deleted scene’ into the body of the feature if I ever got the chance.”

This stunning new iteration opens theatrically October 14 at IFC, preceded by Maddin’s dazzling six-minute award-winning TIFF short The Heart of the World, about science battling religion and two brothers in love with the same woman as the end of the planet approaches, with the director on hand for Q&As following the 8:10 shows on Friday and Saturday night. Maddin is both fascinating and fun to listen to, so snag your tickets now for what promises to be a special event.

LAST FLIGHT HOME

Filmmaker Ondi Timoner says goodbye to her father in Last Flight Home

LAST FLIGHT HOME (Ondi Timoner, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, October 7
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.interloperfilms.com

Filmmaker Ondi Timoner and her family say goodbye to their beloved patriarch in the remarkable Last Flight Home, an honest, deeply human example of how we face death. At the age of ninety-two, Eli Timoner, husband, father, grandfather, friend, boss, and patient, decided that it was time for him to die. “I’ll always be looking down on all of you. Help me go there and end all this agony,” he says from his bed in his California living room.

Eli had spent the previous forty years partially paralyzed, having suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of fifty-three shortly after getting his neck cracked by a masseuse. Because of his disability, he ended up losing his business — he had been the president of Laura Lee Candy and later founded Air Florida — but still managed to put his three children, Rachel (a rabbi), David, and Ondi, through Yale.

The Timoner clan very carefully follows California’s End of Life Option Act, which specifies a fifteen-day period in which the patient goes through a series of medical tests and legal requirements that will allow him to die with dignity, in this case at home surrounded by family. During this time, friends and relatives visit Eli, in person and online, as it is February 2021 and the Covid-19 pandemic is raging. Most of these meetings are warm and happy; everyone is extolling Eli’s life, not mourning his coming passing.

Even as his body fades, his mind is still sharp as he shares memories, tells bad jokes, praises Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow — Eli is a fiercely dedicated liberal — and ponders regrets that haunt him. He gives words of wisdom to his children and grandchildren, who let him know how much they love him and how important he will always be to them, and he returns the love. “You give love, you get love,” he advises one of his grandsons.

“To know this is coming is a luxury,” Ondi says to the hospice nurse, Candice Carsey, and they take full advantage of that, putting together a farewell list, reviewing Eli’s obituary with him, and arranging for the burial plot and funeral. Two-time Sundance winner Ondi (We Live in Public, Dig!) was not initially planning to make a documentary about her father and his passing; she set up unobtrusive cameras to capture the events for herself because that is what she has always done, how she processes things. It wasn’t until her sister asked her to make a memorial video for a Zoom service that she realized the treasure trove of material she had amassed honoring her father’s life. Serving as writer, director, photographer, producer, and editor, Ondi intercuts archival material, including family photographs, home movies, and clips of Eli’s business successes. Her partner, Morgan Doctor, composed the moving score.

As the days count down to March 3, 2021, the viewer feels as if they have become part of the Timoners’ extended family, gaining understanding of the various characters and feeling their pain and love. The film goes beyond cinéma verité or fly-on-the-wall witnessing; it’s a privilege to be invited into what is normally such a private, personal experience. Death is something everyone has their own relationship with, but Ondi turns her father’s passing into a communal gathering that celebrates life as well as dying with dignity.

“Long time since I felt your warmth. I’m so glad to bathe in it,” Eli tells his former daughter-in-law, Felicia Park-Rogers, as they say goodbye to each other. With Last Flight Home, we all get to bathe in the warmth of an ordinary yet extraordinary human being.

Last Flight Home opens October 7 at IFC, with Ondi Timoner participating in Q&As with special guests following the 7:15 shows that night (moderated by Amy Berg) and October 8 (moderated by Sandi DuBowski).

COW

Andrea Arnold’s Cow follows one extraordinary bovine on a cattle farm

COW (Andrea Arnold, 2021)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 8
www.ifccenter.com

Throughout her nearly two decades as a filmmaker, British writer-director Andrea Arnold has focused on strong women facing such commonplace issues as love, romance, motherhood, and poverty, often portrayed by actors at the beginning of their career. Arnold, a single mother who left school at the age of sixteen to become an actor — and whose own mother had four children by the time she was twenty-two — has created such unique and memorable characters as Zoe (Natalie Press) in the Oscar-winning 2003 short Wasp, Jackie (Kate Dickie) in 2006’s Red Road, Mia (Katie Jarvis) in 2009’s Fish Tank, the young Cathy (Shannon Beer) in 2011’s Wuthering Heights, and Star (Sasha Lane) in 2016’s American Honey. (Females also take the lead in Arnold’s early shorts Milk and Dog.)

But the three-time Cannes Jury Prize winner might have found her truest, most poignant protagonist in her stunning debut documentary, Cow, opening April 8 at IFC. I can’t remember the last time I was so deeply affected by a film, from start to finish; it absolutely exhilarated and pulverized me.

Made over the course of six years, the nonfiction work follows an extraordinary dairy cow named Luma on a cattle farm in the English countryside. Cinematographer Magda Kowalczyk zooms in on Luma’s hooves as she walks through thick mud, her hind quarters (complete with number ID) when she squeezes into a tight area to eat, her udders when she is milked, and her powerful, expressive eyes. Luma often looks right at the camera (or gives great side-eye) as if she knows that her life is on view for all to see as she goes about her daily business, which is decidedly not glamorous.

The unforgettable Cow is Andrea Arnold’s nonfiction debut

We witness Luma giving birth twice; it’s both edifying and heartbreaking watching her clean her newborn calves with her tongue, realizing that she will only see them again in large, anonymous groups, not as mother and daughter. We share her sense of freedom when the cows are given free rein of a vast pasture, although they are eventually gathered up and marched back to their more confined spaces. At one point, it seems that Luma is considering running away; standing at an entrance gate, she looks back and forth between the outside world and the inside ranch before despondently listening to the farmers and returning to her duties.

Are Arnold and Kowalczyk, and therefore the audience, humanizing an animal that is not nearly as sentient as it appears? Luma does seem to be keenly aware of her surroundings and what is happening to her, even more so than the other cows. Her eyes speak volumes, and she calls out often, perhaps complaining about her circumstances, knowing there has to be more to life. Arnold cuts numerous times to point-of-view shots, as if we are seeing this world through Luma’s eyes, interpreting her thoughts.

In their 2017 study “The Psychology of Cows,” Lorin Marino and Kristin Allen wrote, “Domestic cows (Bos taurus) are consumed worldwide as beef and veal, kept as dairy product producers, employed as draft animals in labor, and are used for a long list of other products, including leather and manure. But despite global reliance on cows for thousands of years, most people’s perception of them is as plodding herd animals with little individual personality and very simple social relationships or preferences. Yet, a review of the scientific literature on cow behavior points to more complex cognitive, emotional, and social characteristics. . . . Moreover, an understanding of the capabilities and characteristics of domestic cows will, it is hoped, advance our understanding of who they are as individuals.”

Arnold has not made the film merely to highlight one bovine with extraordinary cognitive abilities; at its heart, Cow is about the connection between humans and nature, as well as between animals (and humans) themselves. There are no experts talking about farming, no screen text sharing facts and information about milk and meat or unsanitary and cruel conditions; although we occasionally see the farmers, we don’t know their names or exactly what they’re doing at certain times. They just keep performing their tasks as if the camera were not on, knowing that Luma is the subject, not them.

Arnold lays everything out there, and we can make our own decisions. She is not trying to convert us to veganism, but she is asking us to take a deeper look into our lives and how we treat other living, sentient beings. The ending will shock, if not surprise, you, and you are likely to never forget it.

Cow deserves to enter the pantheon of memorable films about animals, from Sounder, Old Yeller, and National Velvet to The Black Stallion, Okja, and First Cow, which are all fictional. Here Arnold has given us the real deal, a film that is not always easy to watch but is innately, unforgivingly human.

NEW FILMS FROM JAPAN: BLUE

Ogawa Kazuki (Higashide Masahiro) is on a difficult path in Keisuke Yoshida’s Blue

BLUE (Keisuke Yoshida, 2021)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, March 11
www.ifccenter.com
www.ifccenter.com

Several decades ago, when my now-wife and I were visiting her paternal grandfather in Florida, he challenged us while watching the Friday night fights. Grandpa Joe said, “We’re betting a nickel a match, and I’m taking the red corner. The red corner always wins.” He opened up a drawer to reveal dozens and dozens of nickels. He looked at his granddaughter and said, “I won these off your father and brothers. Now it’s your turn.”

In Keisuke Yoshida’s poignant boxing film, Blue, the title refers not only to the corner of the ring — the favored team of fighters gets the red side — but to the emotional and physical state of the competitors and their loved ones. This is not a Japanese Rocky story but a powerful gut punch, one the sport can deliver on and off the canvas.

Tired of being bullied, nerdy Narazaki Tsuyoshi (Emoto Tokio) goes to a boxing gym, telling trainer Urita Nobuto (Matsuyama Kenichi), “I’m not aiming to be a boxer. I just want to be perceived as one.” Narazaki, who is the sole caregiver for his elderly grandmother, also wants to impress the fellow pachinko parlor employee (Ayuri Yoshinaga) he has a crush on. Some of the other boxers make fun of him when he displays his flicker jab, which he learned from the boxing manga Hajime no Ippo. He is then challenged by the punk-haired Doguchi (Shinichirô Matsuura), who shows him no respect.

Urita, a kindhearted soul who has a terrible fight record, getting battered and beaten match after match, takes Narazaki under his wing, and soon Narazaki starts showing signs of promise. Meanwhile, the student at the gym with the best chance of becoming Japanese champion, Ogawa Kazuki (Higashide Masahiro), is having brain issues, forgetting what he’s doing, occasionally feeling lost in the world. Ignoring doctor’s orders — and the wishes of his fiancée, Chika (Fumino Kimura) — Ogawa keeps on training and fighting as things get worse. As the tournament approaches, everyone has unique obstacles to face as they look to futures that are far from certain.

Last winter, as part of the ACA Cinema Project, Japan Society and Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs teamed up for “21st Century Japan: Films from 2001-2020,” a three-week virtual festival of Japanese films from the last twenty years, followed in December by “Flash Forward: Debut Works and Recent Films by Notable Japanese Directors,” a three-week hybrid series pairing directors’ most recent works with their debuts. Now the ACA Cinema Project is presenting the US theatrical premiere of Blue, which opens March 11 at IFC Center, along with Yujiro Harumoto’s award-winning A Balance.

Blue reunites Matsuyama, Higashide, and Kimura from Yoshitaka Mori’s award-winning 2016 drama, Satoshi: A Move for Tomorrow, about professional shogi player Satoshi Murayama. Blue is set in a very different sport, inspired by writer-director Yoshida’s three decades of boxing experience. First and foremost, he gets the boxing right; the scenes in the ring are terrifically photographed with handheld cameras, putting the viewer in the midst of the action. Yoshida (Raw Summer, Café Isobe) also avoids the stereotypes of the genre with well-developed characters and unexpected plot twists that feel realistic and believable.

The young cast is a winning team with instant chemistry, led by Kimura’s charm and Kenichi’s stellar portrayal of the complex Urita. As good as the boxing scenes are, Blue is about so much more. “Don’t you feel frustrated?” Narazaki asks Urita after the latter loses again. “Yes, I’m frustrated,” the Zen-like Urita responds thoughtfully. “I’m frustrated, but if you could transform frustration into strength. . . .”

It’s a feeling we each know all too well, and not just when we lose yet more nickels to Grandpa Joe.