RING WANDERING
A Search for Wolves Turns Surprising
Venue(s): Cinema K2 ShimokitazawaJune 10, 13, 21, 28, 2022. Check the schedule on the theater website for other dates.
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: k2-cinema.com/en
Theater website: k2-cinema.com/event
Theater website: k2-cinema.com/access
Advance tickets: https://k2-cinema.com/en/purchase.pdf
Title: リング・ワンダリング (Ring Wandaring)
Director: Masakazu Kaneko (金子雅和)
Duration: 103 min
Cinema K2 Shimokitazawa continues to champion English-subtitled screenings. The latest release in their ongoing lineup is Masakazu Kaneko’s dark fantasy Ring Wandering, featuring Sho Kasamatsu (breakout star of Tokyo Vice).
The film premiered at the Warsaw Film Festival and Tokyo Filmex in 2021, and took home the highest prize, the Golden Peacock Award, from the International Film Festival of India. Like Kaneko’s debut, The Albino’s Trees, this one explores the relationship between humans and nature, past and present.
Ring Wandering follows a young man (Kasamatsu) who’s writing a manga about Japanese wolves (considered extinct), and as he explores nearby woodlands, starts making unusual discoveries. One night, he meets a strange young woman (Junko Abe), and through her family, learns about the devastating Tokyo air raids of 1945. Eventually, he encounters a wolf… but it’s not what anyone is expecting.
Discussing the impetus for the film, Kaneko said, “Tokyo was undergoing development for the 2020 Olympics, and the landscape was undergoing a transformation. At the same time, they say that the remains of over 100,000 people who died in the air raids 77 years ago are still buried under the ground in Tokyo. I believe that we are living as an extension of those irreplaceable lives, and I wanted to depict that in a film.”
Cinema K2: Shimokita Ekimae Cinema
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.