Mamoru Samuragochi

Akiko returns to her home village in Japan after seven years in South America, where she contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. The town, thick with paranoia, is quick to ostracize the ailing Akiko. With only her best friend and her mom in her corner, Akiko suffers awful discrimination at school and at home.

Although the situation is universal, Japanese mourning rituals are given solid coverage. The 49th day after death is considered crucial, as the date at which the soul passes from this world to the next and, therefore, the date from when the living are expected to get on with life. But Yoko doesn't move on. The ache of the loss that simply won't heal takes an awful toll on her husband and friends, who try doggedly and unsuccessfully to help her move on, and to guide her away from the misguided and damaging belief that daughter Kanako's spirit has entered another living child.

Born to atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima, Mamoru Samuragochi, a self-taught classical composer with a degenerative condition causing deafness, was celebrated as a "Japanese Beethoven" for the digital age. However, just prior to the 2014 Winter Olympics, where Samuragochi's "Sonatina for Violin" was to accompany figure skater Daisuke Takahashi, part-time university lecturer Takashi Niigaki revealed that he had served as the composer's ghostwriter for 18 years, that Samuragochi couldn't notate music and, in fact, could hear perfectly. As Samuragochi's recordings were pulled and performances cancelled, Niigaki enjoyed success on TV talk shows. Filmmaker Tatsuya Mori finds Samuragochi in his small Yokohama apartment with his wife and cat, ready to tell his side of the story. A mesmerizing character study skewering media duplicity and constructions of ability/disability, in which Samuragochi's career has collapsed, taking fact and fiction with it.