A father’s travel photos are form the basis of an anodyne trip down memory lane in Aya Koretzky’s meandering essay-film
I couldn’t make
Friends with this film, an indulgent, self-conscious essay-memoir movie from director Aya Koretzky. It is about her Japanese father Jiro, who in 1970 took off from his home town of Yokohama and travelled through Europe, north Africa, the
Middle East and the US, before settling in Portugal, where Aya was born. He assiduously recorded his travels with photos and made pleasant, anodyne remarks in his journal, which are read aloud here. (“These buildings are amazing”; “The man who created this must have had an amazing spiritual drive”; “America is different from Europe; it seems more liberal and free.”)
At the beginning, the film shows the elderly Jiro digging up he father’s buried trove of prints and negatives (did he really bury them or is it a conceit?) and then we go through the pictures, with occasional sound effects and accompanying faux Super-8 footage: a mannerism too prevalent in documentaries now. But Jiro’s comments are frankly not especially interesting, and he remains elusive and opaque in ways that are unrewarding for the viewer.