DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: Kore-eda Hirokazu
PRODUCTION CO: Gaga, Toho
SCREENPLAY: Sakamoto Yuji
​PHOTOGRAPHY: Kondo Yuto
EDITOR: Kore-eda Hirokazu
MUSIC: Sakamoto Ryūichi
WITH: Andō (Mugino Saori), Nagayama Eita (Hori Michitoshi), Kurokawa Sōya (Mugino Minato), Hiiragi Hinata (Hoshikawa Yori), Takahata Mitsuki (Suzumura Hirona), Kakuta Akihiro (Shoda Humiaki)

​​FESTIVALS: Cannes

REVIEWS

 “The best of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films achieve a rare quality: a sublime everydayness, in which simple matters of life take on breathtaking, poetic shape ... His new film, Monster, initially seems to be a simple, issue-driven movie designed to yank at heartstrings. Sakura Ando, so memorable in Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, plays Saori, a dry cleaner in a small Japanese city whose son, tweenage Minato (Soya Kurokawa), is having some mental health difficulties. He’s quiet and moody at home, he’s acting out at school, and in one frightening instance he seems to have a propensity for self-harm. Kore-eda sets this all up in such a way that we, the perhaps slightly jaded audience, assume we know what’s coming. The film will chronicle Saori’s struggle to reach her son, and his journey toward betterment. Saori’s husband has died at some indefinite point in the past, so it seems that grief will come to bear on this process of understanding and healing. But then Sakamoto Yuji’s script leads us in unexpected directions … The film is essentially concerned with how a secret, closely held by private fear and societal demand, can affect far more people than just the one keeping it… The film, at once warmly exuberant and carefully restrained, is… built with the compassion and inventiveness so signature to its creator.”

– Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

​Whanganui   
Monday, 23 February, 7.00pm

Nelson   
Wednesday, 11 March, 6.00pm

Auckland     
Monday, 30 March, 7.00pm ​

Hamilton   
Monday, 04 May, 6.30pm

​Wellington     
Monday, 18 May, 6.00pm

Wellington     
Monday, 18 May, 830pm

Queenstown
Tuesday, 26 May, 8.00pm

Canterbury
Monday, 06 July, 7.00pm

Timaru     
Tuesday, 04 August, 6.30pm

Palmerston North     
Wednesday, 16 September, 6.00pm

Carterton   
Friday, 30 October, 7.30pm
CONTEMPORARY JAPAN >>​