With this curious, evenly paced, and often beautiful film, a black American director, Aaron Woolfolk, takes us to the heartland of Japan. You will not find another film like it in the world, and this originality has nothing to do with its style (which is very simple in direction, photography, and narrative structure) and everything to do with its content (a black American encounter of the rural side of Japanese society). What makes this encounter truly original is that it involves one culture, urban American, functioning as a mode or platform for accessing another culture, rural Japanese.
What I mean is this: Though Lost in Translation was set in Tokyo, it was not about the life of that city, but about the lives of wealthy white Americans visiting that city. It was a film made by a wealthy white American about wealthy white Americans. Very little information connected to the urban side of Japanese culture entered any part of the film. This is not the case with The Harimaya Bridge—almost every part of the film is packed with cultural information about rural Japan: the power structure of its education system, its forms of racial and class discrimination, the way the living relate to the dead, and so on and so on.
Bridge’s plot concerns a bitter and bereaved black American (Bennet Guillory) who visits Japan to reclaim all the paintings made by his dead son (Victor Grant), an English and art instructor killed in a car accident. The black American is obnoxious and big; the culture he enters is very delicate and complicated. The movie, however, spends little time explaining the father’s motives and much of its energy exploring a wonderful world of hills, small homes, and tiny country roads. Grand Illusion, Fri 6:45 and 9 pm, Sat–Sun 4, 6:45, and 9 pm, Mon–Wed 6:45 and 9 pm.
