Directed by Tokyo born Hirokazu Kore-eda, Maborosi is an extremely slow, yet visually pleasing film about a young women’s struggle to get on with life after her husband commits suicide by jumping in front of a train – leaving their child fatherless. After her husband’s death, she is “set up” with another man who lives on the coast with a child of his own. Made in 1995, this film has a classically Japanese style to it. The cinematography is very lush – however I found the film just too slow to seriously concentrate. Nothing really seemed to happen during the whole 110 minutes! There were a lot of scenery shots, and one scene where the new husband is eating fish at the kitchen table for about 10 minutes! Why this scene was included, and why it went for so long remains a mystery to me! The music throughout the film was very beautiful and lovely to listen to, however there wasn’t enough of it to keep me awake. I’m also not completely sure whether I fell asleep in sections and missed bits of the plot, or whether some sections of the stories just didn’t connect together – but I found this film very hard to follow. The characters in the film where very powerful, and the way the director used light and space to convey emotions was very interesting, however, I just honestly thought this film had no real point to it – and if it did, it could have been compressed into a 5 minute short film. Obviously I wasn’t its biggest fan.