ナンマイダブ

Overview

Michiko, a high school student with no friends and no family to talk to, often goes to the riverbank by herself. There, she meets her childhood friend Yukio, who dropped out of high school to work at a factory, two bad kids, an old man who fishes for fish in the river, which are said to kill you if you eat them, and an old woman who keeps chanting "Nan mai dabu" to the river. One day, Ochan is nowhere to be seen and the bad kids tell Michiko that he died after eating the fish he caught. The film is distinguished by the characters who do not appear on screen, and by the depth of its direction, which makes us imagine that Michiko and Yukio will eventually become a strange old woman and an old man. The subtly textured black-and-white screen makes the rough but wry dialogue all the more interesting.