Shinichiro Tsuruoka

This director is the worst and the best. The protagonist, Wakaizumi, makes films with his university friends, but despite being a director, he has no credibility at all due to his selfish and unprincipled nature. He has no finished films. All they have are rumours that he is a strong fighter and that he has eaten cockroaches. Wakaizumi says he wants reality in his films, but he does not know what reality is. Days seem to be unchanging. But as much as something about him hurts people, something about him attracts them, and the filmmaking continues. The well-crafted double structure in terms of composition, direction and camerawork goes beyond the framework of a self-proclaimed 'personal history film' and gives us the best of both worlds: fiction and non-fiction.

Elusive memories flash in the back of his head. Visualising the people and landscapes as they are there, as casually as they are there, should be a difficult task, just as the protagonist struggled with the writing process. However, the film succeeds in vividly depicting the subtle atmosphere felt only in primary schools and only in junior high school, thanks in part to the fine performances of Watanabe Sayaka and her friends, who brilliantly play everyone from primary schools students to preparatory school students. There are no particularly dramatic episodes, but after watching the film, you will feel nostalgic for all the people in the film.