Inugami

A mini-festival spared me the bother of buying this, and gave the opportunity of seeing it on a large screen. "Inugami" opens with an aerial shot of a two-lane following the low winding juncture of two lushly forested mountains. It's the kind of landscape that inspires Hayao Miyazaki. At the end of the line, find a small, insular, modern-day village, on whose outskirts a not-old old-maid follows generations-old traditions making very fine paper.

Our out-of-town protagonist falls in love with the paper-maker. Small town tensions, based both in the present and in the past, simmer, boil, explode.

Not great, but worth seeing for the scenery and paper-making alone. Put's me in mind of Mitsuo Yanagimachi's 1985 "Himatsuri."