In This Corner of the World (2016)

Intro: Bo ten Kate

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• € 12 regular
• € 0 Cineville gratis
• Valid for Cineville More info

20:45 Doors 21:15 In This Corner of the World (2016)

Together with Kaboom Animation Festival we bring the best anime to the big screen!

With a knack for drawing, writing, and daydreaming, Suzu is a kind-hearted, creative young woman growing up in 1930s-40s Japan. At 18, she leaves her seaside hometown near Hiroshima to marry a young military clerk in the naval city of Kure, just 20 or so kilometres away. As Suzu adjusts to life away from her family, the shadow of war begins to loom over the townspeople. Slowly, air raid sirens and bombings become routine, and life shifts into survival.

There have been numerous films about “the bomb” and Japan’s suffering during WWII – Ghibli’s harrowing classic Grave of the Fireflies and the Hiroshima-set Barefoot Gen among them – but few have foregrounded the country’s natural world and its quietly resilient people as powerfully as Sunao Katabuchi’s remarkably understated In This Corner of the World. Drawing on thousands of photographs, journals, diaries, and old maps, Katabuchi and his team spent years developing this adaptation of the manga of the same name.

The film’s sunlit, hand-drawn and water-coloured world evokes hope even amid its depictions of lost childhoods, young men getting drafted, women left behind, food rationing, and untimely deaths. Though Katabuchi once served as an assistant under Hayao Miyazaki, his storytelling has more in common with Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata. In This Corner of the World is a poignant reminder of the power of the human spirit in the face of war. Even when surrounded by humanity’s darkest acts, beauty still manages to endure in small, quiet corners.

Melkweg often hosts different types of programmes at the same time, such as concerts, club nights and films. Please note that there may occasionally be some noise pollution from other programmes during the screening.