The title of Nobuhiro Yamashita's A Gentle Breeze in the Village poignantly conveys the tone of this film. Witnessing the gentle coming of age of young Soyo (played by Kaho), the oldest of the students in her small, combined elementary and middle school, personifies for the viewer the lush yet gentle breeze that reverberates throughout the beautiful landscape shots of the Japanese countryside. Oh, to be young and going to the beach and playing with your friends again every day all summer--oh, and getting chased by ghosts on railroad tracks. Each young character is so "full of love" for her friends, to quote a few of the characters themselves.

A Gentle Breeze in the Village was adapted from Fusako Kuramochi’s popular manga series Tennen Kokekko, and one of the young, female characters in the film is a talented manga artist.

A few more delightful details after the jump -- amongst many more to be discovered if you see the movie!

There are two more screenings of the film during the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. The film shows today at 4:30 p.m. in Berkeley at the Pacific Film Archive Theater, and it will be screening again at Sundance Kabuki at 6:30 p.m. on Monday.

Soyo has been the only one in her grade all her life, but in her final year before graduating on to high school, gorgeous and stylish Osawa (Masaki Okada) moves to the village from Tokyo. We found Osawa to be refreshingly unpretentious and down-to-earth--we imagine that an American character in such a film would have been portrayed as elusive and stuck-up, at least during the first half. Osawa's effort to bond with Soyo is also refreshingly gentle, and he even gives her his hip windbreaker that he "searched all over Tokyo for" in exchange for a painfully awkward kiss.

Each characters' home life seems pretty wonderful too, and the only worries seem to be about the children growing up and leaving everyone behind. The five-year-old little girl was the last child in the village, and Soyo was worried about what would become of the school. There was also a hint of dysfunction among the parents' generation, especially between Soyo's father and Osawa's newly divorced mother, who had left the village years ago and gotten married. Her return stirred up quite a bit of gossip, and a subtle resentment over her leaving the village was also detected.