第30屆香港國際電影節電影
Film of the 30th Hong Kong International Film Festival

This film is made by Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov but the whole film is in Japanese. The story is about the Japanese Emperor Hirohito at the time when Japan had to surrender towards the end of the WWII. The film is very slow-paced but with that it also reveals a lot of details about the life in the Japanese palace and Japanese culture that a normal commercial film cannot do. The story describes the human side of Emperor Hirohito. An emperor is considered a god in the Japanese culture, but Hirohito thought that he was no god but human, and the idea of the film is surrounding this thought. English subtitles are shown with a separate projector which disturbs the contrast of the screen to a little extent. However, there are not subtitles when the Emperor spoke in English and the actor's English was actually quite difficult to understand, at least with the accent that the actor Ogata Issey. All in all, this is not an entertainment film, but it does raise my interest in understanding the story.