Cherry Blossoms - Hanami (Germany)

The well deserved winner of the audience awarded Golden Space Needle award for best film this year. A great film that deserves to be seen.
At the start of the film a German woman learns that her husband is terminally ill. The doctors advise her to do something special with him as he has some healthy time left. Rightly or wrongly she can't seem to bring herself to tell him the news. Unable to convince him to take the trip to Japan she's always dreamed of they settle for a trip to visit their children in Berlin. The children aren't so thrilled to see them and after a few days the couple heads to the shore. Better times are had there, for a while. The longish festival description (and many reviews I suspect) go into more detail about what then transpires. I saw the movie with little info going in and I think that greatly helped. So I'm going to stop the description of events at this point. There's a lot packed into this film, family relationships, humor, the importance of exploring dreams, cross cultural experiences, work/life balance and Butoh dancing. The visuals are great and the writing/acting makes everything feel very natural. I just don't have the words to really do justice to this film. You'd be a hard person though to be able to leave without a tear at least starting to form.

I need to go back and see more of the films by Doris Dorrie. I realized afterwards that I'd seen Enlightenment Guaranteed on video several years ago. Also a very good film which is definitely indicating I need to seek out the work in between.

There are sad moments, but the film did not leave me depressed at it's end. It just left me feeling like I'd seen something beautiful. I just tremble in fear though at the thought of a Hollywood remake...