Lilou's Adventure (Lilou no Boken)(妮露的冒險)

My 8th HKIFF came from our neighbor to the east, from the land of the rising sun. It's got a funny name Lilou no Boken or Lilou's Adventure. It's a story of loneliness and the kind of unusual adventure that it may lead to.

Lilou is a sensitve black girl whose father is a Guibean jazz musician who is bashful and doesn't like to be teased. Her primary 5 classmate Kokoro is another odd ball kid who never smiles because she longs to but can't dream. But there is a strange chemistry between the two and they become best friends in the school in a small Japanese town where from time to tome, the girls can dance to some African rhythms. Lilou is determined to help Kokoro dream so that she can smile again.

One day, Kokoro mysteriously disappeared. Lilou followed certain clues from an electronic game and managed to finally to find her. in Tokyo! The two could play again, despite occasional temper tantrums and little fights. As the movie ends, we see images of the two girls meeting, floating in the air, a blue sky behind and story book type clouds behind them and the father of Lilou tells us it's not the end but the beginning of Lilou's adventures. 

This 2012 film called Lilou No Boken ( Lilou's adventure), the second feature film by Kumusaka Izuru, is in a class all its own. It's both realistic and surrealistic at the same time. The way the kids play and fight are realistic enough but they way Kokoro suddenly vanishes and how she is found again is not.  This film won the Red Chameleon award at CinDi in Seoul in 2012. it's perhaps Kumasaka's exploration of the strange workings of the human subconscious. Perhaps Kokoro's inability to dream could only be resolved when she abandons herself to the world of imagination. In the film we are shown repeated images of Kokoru visiting what looks like an old black woman lying in bed in some kind of hospital or sanatorium, in the dark, without any sun. Is that the image of a sick subconscious? If there's any logic in the dream which connect the various images on the screen, could that be the logic of dreams, which is free to roam over space and time without any any apparent constraint. Is that not also the logic in a child's mind?  If we wish to access that world, do we not have to employ a kind of logic which is very different from the logic of the conventional linear dualistic narrative logic of our everyday social life and use a kind of logic which is much more free flowing?