SUPER HAPPY FOREVER World Cinema

Screening to be followed by a conversation with actors Hiroki Sano and Yoshinori Miyata.

Kohei Igarashi’s Venice Days opening film is a gentle, unassuming love story told in retrospect. The recently widowed 20-something Sano and his best friend Miyata return to the onsen resort town of Atami in the Izu Peninsula of Japan, where five years ago Sano met and fell in love with his late wife Nagi. Retracing the steps of that fateful vacation, Sano is determined to find a long-lost red baseball cap of significant importance, seemingly chasing a past that has already faded away and shuttered for good. Structured between the past and present, between a grieving Sano and a curiously oddball Nagi, SUPER HAPPY FOREVER playfully explores the ephemeral, intangible malleability of time, shifting between connections and disconnections amongst the various characters interacting and cohabiting in this picturesque beach town. Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea,” a repeat karaoke favorite, becomes an unlikely anthem to this evocative, sincere musing on lost love and friendships. –Anna Li