Trailer - Deep in the Valley [English-subtitled]

Here’s the trailer for Atsushi Funahashi’s Deep in the Valley, which premiered at Berlinale back in February and was screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in late March. The story merges documentary elements with a story of young romance and ties it all together with fictional elements gleaned from Rohan Koda’s “Five-Story Pagoda”, a Japanese period drama penned in the late 1800s.

In the film, a young woman named Kaori (Mayu Sato) works for a non-profit organization which restores home movie footage donated by citizens of the Yanaka neighborhood of Tokyo in order to preserve them for historical reference and screen them for the community. Kaori finds out there used to be a five-story pagoda in the middle of Yanaka cemetary which burned down in 1957, and there’s a rumor going around that someone still has 8mm footage of the fire.

Her mission to track down this lost footage leads her to a local street thug named Hisaki (Yuki Nomura), who proves to be instrumental in helping her unravel the mysteries of the lost pagoda. Eventually the story shifts back to the events which led up to the pagoda’s construction in the 1800s, with the same cast members playing historical roles in these sequences.

Source: Official website