Yuku is a hunter who works for animal damage control programmes in the mountains of central Japan.
In order to afford the medical bills for the treatment of his mother’s illness, he accepts a lucrative contract to kill a rare, white deer that lives in the forest by a remote village, and whose presence is thought to undermine tourism in the region by the neighbouring town’s bureaucrats.
As he ventures into the village, however, he discovers that the animal is venerated as a god by the local community, which lives in a state of semi-isolation from the rest of society. While assessing his ethical responsibilities in undertaking such a task, he gets closer to inhabitants of the village, facing their conflicting emotions as to whether they should keep living as “outsiders”.
Being human inevitably implies the killing of other living things.
Yet we often lack the real sense of what killing means, and our awareness of it is usually limited to some numbers on a paper. Indeed, especially for those like me who have been growing up in a metropolis, there’s the tendency to overlook the fact that our everyday life entails the sacrifice of other lives, and we are too often driven by egoism in trying to protect ourselves and those close to us at the expense of others.
In this movie, by focusing on the struggle of a man over the life and death of an animal, I tried to express not only the constantly problematic relationship between people and nature, but the importance of thinking about others as well.
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