Confessions

17th October 2010

Following the critical acclaim of his previous features, Kamikaze Girls and Memories Of Matsuko, genre-busting auteur Tetsuya Nakashima returns with Confessions, a notably darker but equally absorbing and typically idiosyncratic work, this time adapted from the award winning debut novel by Kanae Minato.

Written and directed by Nakashima, Confessions has been selected at Japan’s official entry in the Best Foreign Film category of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards (the final list of nominees will announced on 25th January 2011) and will have its UK premiere screening at the Film4 Frightfest All-Nighter on 30th October 2010 at London’s Empire Cinema.

The film will also be part of Ireland’s Access Cinema Japanese Film Festival, which will tour Dublin, Cork and Galway from 29th October to 14th November 2011.

Reigning in his impulse to create surreal candy-coloured worlds full of chaos and confusion, with Confessions Nakashima opts instead for an intense drama throbbing with dark emotions and powered by a savage central performance.

Takako Matsu (K-20: Legend Of The Mask) stars as Yuko Moriguchi, a middle-school teacher whose four-year-old daughter is found dead. Shattered, she finally returns to her classroom only to become convinced that two of her students were responsible for her daughter’s murder. No one believes her, and she may very well be wrong, but she decides, nevertheless, that it’s time to take her revenge. What happens next is all-out psychological warfare waged against her students in an attempt to force them into confessing what she knows in her heart to be true: they are guilty and must be punished.

Here is the trailer…

Brilliantly building the psychological tension from the film’s very start before pulling out all the stops for a devastating and explosive finale, Nakashima has produced what is arguably his most mature and impressive work to date. A superb script, excellent performances from a fine cast and a perfectly pitched soundtrack (that includes tracks by Radiohead, acclaimed Japanese experimental rock band, Boris, and this year’s Mercury Prize winners, The XX) make Confessions one of the most original and impressive films of the year.

Confessions (cert. tbc) will be released in UK cinemas by Third Window Films early in 2011.

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