Was very lucky to see it at the Asian Film Festival and heard the director talk about the production process. Initially I did not realize it was directed by Chiang Hsiu-chiung, a Taiwan female director who also directed the award-winning documentary Let the Wind Carry Me. This movie looks very low budgeted and quite feminist. All main characters were women and children. For the limited male characters, they do not seem to have nice characters.
I also did not realize it is inspired from a true story: a female coffee brewer Yuko decided to go back from Tokyo to her hometown in Ishigawa Noto Peninsula near Kanazawa and continue her small business. The director told us the actual coffee shop was not far away from the one in the movie.
Though the director and the original coffee brewer Yuko only communicated through simple English, they stayed at each other's homes in Japan and Taiwan to know more about each other. No wonder the director said the Japanese media said there are some similarities between the director, Yuko and the main actress Hiromi Nagasaku. In the movie, Hiromi Nagasaku plays the role of Misaki Yoshida, a Tokyo woman who has a strong love for coffee. After her father went missing for seven years, the notary told her that her father is legally dead and she has to inherit his debt and a small boathouse in his hometown.
Separated from her father since she was four, Misaki decided to move back to her home town while waiting for her father to come back since she believes he is still alive. While she is transforming the boathouse into a café, she befriends with two children, Arisa (Hiyori Sakurada) and her younger brother Shota (Kaisei Hotamori) who live nearby and whose single mother Eriko Yamasaki (Nozomi Sasaki) is not always home as she has to work in Kanazawa.
Misaki shows a strong and composed sense of confidence. The whole movie has a sense of comfort and hope though the tempo is a bit slow and the art direction a little pretentious. But the cinematography is beautiful. Perhaps in that rural coastal town whenever you put up your camera the scenery is pretty.
There are not a lot of dialogues but the actors, even children, seem to be conveying lots of emotions. The director does not speak a word of Japanese but the actors are very professional and perceptive, thus able to deliver what she wants. Amazing.
It is quite a feminist movie because it is the female who is stronger in the movie. All of them take the initiative to reorganize their lives, though they have spent/wasted a long time waiting for a man. That, to me, is comforting.
