What are the limits of forgiveness? Our various gods may forgive our sins, but we humans don't always find it easy to follow suit. Violations of the body are among the crimes hardest to forgive, since the victims are left with not only scars, visible and invisible, but also a cold anger against the perpetrator(s).
Tatsushi Omori has been filming the outer limits of human behavior since his 2005 directorial debut "Germanium no Yoru (The Whispering of the Gods)," whose outlaw hero, sexually abused as a boy, returns to the monastery where he was raised for a confrontation with his now elderly abuser.
Not unexpectedly, violence is also a frequent motif in Omori's five films to date, including his latest, "Sayonara Keikoku (The Ravine of Goodbye)." Based on a short story by Shuichi Yoshida, whose fiction also inspired the critically acclaimed "Akunin (Villain)" and "Yokomichi Yonosuke (A Story of Yonosuke)," the film begins with a media pack besieging the apartment of a woman suspected of murdering her own child. When the police come to make the arrest, the pack's frenzy reaches a peak, though the couple next door, busy with their passionate love-making, have been oblivious to the commotion outside.