In the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, many filmmakers spoke of how deeply the disaster had affected them, but few have tried to confront it head-on. Some of the most successful efforts to date have been documentaries, one of which inspired this quietly devastating drama.
¡°Voices in the Wind¡± is based on a real-life pilgrimage spot: a telephone booth in Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, known as the ¡°wind phone,¡± where mourners go to have conversations with people they¡¯ve lost.
It¡¯s easy to imagine this providing the basis for a mawkish tearjerker, along the lines of the 2018 film adaptation of Toshikazu Kawaguchi¡¯s novel ¡°Before the Coffee Gets Cold.¡± Instead, director Nobuhiro Suwa takes a more experimental approach, and withholds the story¡¯s main hook until so late in the day, it¡¯s practically a coda.
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