"Sepia Landscape" is a Japanese-Polish production based on the acclaimed novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize laureate, which premiered in the official selection of the Cannes festival. Directed by Keigo Ishikawa, the film is a tense and elliptical story about family secrets, the traps of memory, and the fragile bond between mother and daughter.
Niki, a twenty-five-year-old writer raised in Britain, visits her mother Etsuko in the English countryside. The pretext is the sale of the family home, but behind what appears to be an ordinary meeting lies the need to ask questions that have remained unspoken for years. Niki knows little about her mother's Japanese past, about post-war Nagasaki, which Etsuko left for Britain, or the circumstances in which her older sister Keiko departed Japan with her. Etsuko's confessions are full of gaps, evasions and silences; each memory may be either a clue leading to the truth or a veil protecting against painful recollection.
Kei Ishikawa brings to the screen a world characteristic of Ishiguro—one of fleeting memories, emotions hidden beneath the surface, and a past that can never be fully told. The atmosphere of mounting tension and mystery is built by the stylish, hypnotic cinematography of Piotr Niemyjski and the music of Paweł Mykietyn, a composer known for the films "IO" and "Essential Killing". The film is produced by Mariusz Włodarski, producer of such titles as "Girl with a Needle", "Sweat" and "Bad Sister".
