Wild Berries (Japanese Movie)

Description: Also known by the English title Wild Berries, Hebi Ichigo is a dark and off-kilter comedy from twenty-nine year-old director Miwa Nishikawa, a protege of internationally-acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda. The Akechis are a normal, seemingly typical middle-class Japanese family that has its superficial mask ripped away when the daughter brings her fiance home for the customary introduction to her parents. On the surface, the family may seem like any other, but bubbling just out of sight are the twisted workings of a traditional Japanese family dissected and dismembered by the insidious social pressures of contemporary Japanese society. Family members are revealed as uncaring, self-serving, or even demented in their race to cope with the world around them. An intelligent and dark satire about ordinary life, that elicits unexpected and even bitter laughs, Hebi Ichigo announces the arrival of a future filmmaking voice in young Miwa Nishikawa.