MOONGIRL: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
Set in Hokkaido, Japan, MOONGIRL tells the story of a young writer who shares a story with a young man while walking through the snow. As she tells it, fiction and reality gradually mix, until the story begins shaping their lives. Years later, the young man has become an old painter who has devoted his entire life to preserving the memory of a mysterious woman who may—or may not—have come from the Moon.
“Every film I make is haunted by a very personal obsession: Life goes on, and it must. Even when the material is dark or sad I think of myself as a deeply optimistic person. Where there is life, there is hope. And no matter what happens to us, the one thing we owe ourselves is to keep living. Because life is infinitely precious.
And so the question at the heart of MOONGIRL is:
How do we find beauty inside unbearable sadness?
How can the loss of a loved one become not only a wound, but a source of inspiration, even wonder?”
““Was she really from the Moon?” you might ask yourself when the film ends. But does it really matter?
We want to believe she was from somewhere impossible because we’re forever drawn to stories that make us dream, reach toward the sublime, the inexplicable. But she could just as easily be an ordinary woman from another place, transformed by memory, love, and grief into something mythic. And if she is, then the film becomes an ode to love itself: the immensity of it, what it does to us that reason can’t explain. All our loved ones are a Moongirl or a Moon boy in their own way”
The ending leaves open whether she truly came from the Moon, or whether he transformed an ordinary encounter into myth through the force of artistic creation. Back at his home by the sea, the old painter’s body lies still, as though part of him had already departed before the journey began.
