Look Back

Sometimes a few strokes are enough to create a whole world. Fujino draws manga for the school newspaper and enjoys her small fame, until the pictures of the reclusive Kyomoto appear next to hers: landscapes and spaces of a precision that awakens her ambition. Fujino practises until the hurt turns into pure obsession. When the girls finally meet, a friendship grows from it that deepens with every sheet of paper. They draw together, work, dream of a future as artists. Until reality breaks into this fragile world with a violence against which no pencil can do anything.

With “Look Back”, Hirokazu Koreeda adapts Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga as a tender reflection on the time that art costs, and on what it gives us in return: insight, perhaps inner peace. Almost like a haiku, he condenses feelings into small gestures: a hand on paper, a shared walk to school. “Look Back” always also tells of cinema itself: how a line becomes an image, images become movement and movement becomes memory. Just when grief threatens to devour everything, Koreeda finds his way back to the simplicity of his images. “Look Back” is a touching plea for drawing on when one’s own life has long since stopped giving answers.