Landscape in sepia color

“Landscape in the color of sepia” is a Japanese-Polish production based on the famous novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize, premiered in the selection of the official Cannes festival. Directed by Kei Ishikawa, the film is full of tension and understatement, a tale of family secrets, memory traps and the fragile bond between mother and daughter.

Niki, a twenty-five-year-old writer raised in Britain, visits her mother Etsuko in the English province. The pretext is the sale of the family home, but behind the seemingly ordinary meeting there is a need to ask questions that have remained unspoken for years. Niki knows little about her mother's Japanese past, about the post-war Nagasaki from which Etsuko left for Britain, or about the circumstances under which her eldest daughter Keiko left Japan with her. Etsuko's confessions are full of loopholes, evasions and silences; each memory can be both a clue to the truth and a veil to protect against painful memory. (gutekfilm.pl)