Synopsis

Staff

Producer Koji YAMAMURA 

Scenario/Storyboard/Animation/Editing Yu TAKEHARA 

Sound Sonosuke ITAGAKI

Voice Riko, Kana KUROKI

Program Note

When she was very young, her mother left without a word. Since then, she has lived with her grandmother. And now that grandmother no longer remembers her birthday. My Winter Berry is not a work that delivers its sorrow, longing, and heartache for a grandmother through sentimental indulgence. It is, above all, an accumulation and continuation of record. The director has drawn her grandmother again and again, whenever the chance arose. She keeps drawing, even as her grandmother's memories gradually fade. Rather than slipping into pity or sentimentalism, she documents her grandmother with quiet, steady resolve. (A highlight: the scene where the director talks with her aunt in a car in the parking lot of her grandmother's care facility on a pouring rainy day — seemingly unremarkable, yet it distills the very essence of this film's understated clarity.)

NAH Ho-won