Having attended a few funerals here and seen dozens more on the screen, I thought I knew a bit about the ceremonies and rituals surrounding death in Japan. But "Born Bone Born" by comedian and director Toshiyuki Teruya (aka Gori) proved me wrong — at least about his native Okinawa.
Based on his award-winning short film, the similarly titled "Born Bone Boon," "Born Bone Born" centers on "bone washing," the Okinawan ritual of washing the bones of the deceased four years after their entombment.
One point of reference is "Departures," Yojiro Takita's 2008 film about the similarly rare (at least in Japan) ritual of encoffining. But where the encoffiners of "Departures" labor to bring the dead back to a semblance of life, the family in "Born Bone Born" confronts the raw fact of death in a decomposed corpse.
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