Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

Tokyo, now(...ish). The island is threatened by a bad earthquake that never seems to arrive. Tokyo is threatened by political termoil… but life goes on, and two boys, Yuta and Kou, approach the end of school.

"A prank pulled on their Principal leads to a controversial new surveillance system that not only monitors the students but gives them demerits when they do something wrong. As the students push back against Big Brother, these young people are forced to decide what matters to them and how much they're willing to fight for it. At one point, Yuta says to Kou, "We'll all die while you just merrily go on,” to which he responds, “If we're going to die, let's have fun"" - Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com.

Set so much in the here and now helps make the scenario seem all the more possible, but "Japanese director Neo Sora is no catastrophist: the vision of dystopia he puts forth in his coolly compelling first fiction feature is chilling precisely because it won't take some thunderous Armageddon to bring it about. Instead, in a near future that's barely a stone's throw from now, beset by many of our present predicaments and a sense of impending but not quite imminent apocalypse, his teenage heroes come of age as kids have always done. It's just that here, there is the added poignancy of experiencing the end of the beginning of life amid what might just be the beginning of the end of the world." - Mark Schilling, Japan Times.

This looks like a cracking drama with undertones of a world moving more and more to control and lack of freedom; what does that remind you of..?