CINEOS Premiere

The Ballad of Narayama

In a starving mountain village, an old woman calmly prepares for the custom that will have her son carry her up the mountain to die — and the film makes that act feel loving, brutal and cosmically ordinary all at once.

It refuses you any protective distance — sex, rot, tenderness and starvation are all filmed with the same unblinking flatness, denying you the comfort of knowing when to feel. When release finally comes, snow falling on the old woman, the film immediately cuts back to the living going about their animal business and revokes it. What stays is the image of her composed on the mountain, and the unbearable sense that her death is both wrong and cosmically correct.