Shunji Iwai’s White Films – Fantasia International Film Festival

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Shunji Iwai’s White Films – Love Letter, April Story and hana & alice.

Few filmmakers capture the wonder and angst of young adulthood like Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai. With the hazy, sentimental lens of his regular cinematographer Noboru Shinoda, Iwai’s early feature films explore pivotal moments in teenage life through the mundane challenges of the everyday. Audiences quickly embraced Iwai’s treatment of grief and love with his smash debut Love Letter, about a woman rediscovering her late fiancé through letters exchanged with his former classmate. Linked by their cold introductions, Iwai and Shinoda’s subsequent films – 1998’s April Story, about a shy girl’s move to university, and 2004’s romantic con-job hana & alice – trace the changing times as much as the changing hearts of their characters, and collapse style and substance into lyrical poetry. These “White Films” express Shunji Iwai’s unique view on young love and loneliness and exemplify the dreamy landscapes he nostalgically maps in his films.

SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTORS’ SET FEATURES:

• 4K digital restorations, approved by filmmaker Shunji Iwai, with new 5.1 surround soundtrack mix presented in DTS-HD Master Audio
• Fantasia International Film Festival 2020 live-streamed tribute, masterclass, and Career Achievement Award with Shunji Iwai, hosted by Ariel Esteban Cayer
• Animated storyboards for Love Letter
• Music videos directed by Iwai and featuring April Story star and pop singer Takako Matsu
• Filming of H&A, an 80-minute behind-the-scenes feature on the making of hana & alice
• Four short films featuring Hana and Alice
• Theatrical trailers and TV spots
• New English subtitle translations
• PLUS: Essays by Japanese film scholar David Desser and critics Grady Hendrix and Hayley Scanlon

Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Our Little Sister.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) is a scenic and gently sensitive domestic drama that confirms its maker’s reputation as a great director in the tradition of Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. Adapted from a popular Japanese comic book, the film concerns three twentysomething sisters – Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika – who live together in an old, large house in the seaside city of Kamakura. When their long absent father dies, they travel to a small countryside town for his funeral and meet their shy, teenage half-sister for the first time. Bonding quickly with the orphaned Suzu, they invite her to live with them and the four sisters commence a new life of tentatively joyful discovery. With documentary precision and picturesque elegance, Our Little Sister is a touching survey of love, generosity, and the weight of family histories.

Disc Features:

• New high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Hirokazu Kore-eda and cinematographer Mikiya Takimoto, with DTS-HD Master audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Documentaries on the making of Our Little Sister including revisiting locations with the cast and cooking dishes featured in the film
• Interview with Kore-eda for French television
• Footage and interviews from the red carpet at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival
• 2015 Cannes Film Festival press conference
• Trailer
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by Japanese film scholar Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano