CINEOS Premiere

Ikiru

A civil servant who has spent decades stamping papers learns he is dying, and spends what's left trying to prove a single life can still mean something.

It makes you physically feel the years the man wasted and the few months he did not, so time registers as weight rather than measurement. Grief is mostly withheld — held in his posture, in what he cannot say to his son — until the swing in the snow releases decades of buried life through one image and one quietly sung song. Afterward it turns its central question on you, and asking whether you too are only waiting to die does not let go quickly.