Finding Fukue
Three years ago, Canadian musician Jessica Stuart tried again to find a lost friend in Japan. The resulting twenty-minute short film about her quest is a touching story of brief childhood friendships that echo through a lifetime, the experience of being an outsider, memories meeting the present, how and why we fall out of touch, and what that means for us. Last year Stuart and the filmmakers came together remotely to reflect on the film and its reception.
This struck a chord for me—and from the sounds of their follow-up piece, for many others—because I had my own lost friend between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, from during my family’s four-month stint in the U.S. when I was twelve. What is it about brief, intense, time-limited friendships at that age that has such a powerful impact? Does the always-connected online world mean that these stories of losing touch for years will become less common? My own old friend and I found each other again thanks to early-’90s email directories.
(A post I made to Metafilter last month that I forgot to mention here.)