Trailer for Shun'ichi Nagasaki's HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK (YAMI UTSU SHINZÔ), starring Takashi Na

The official website for Shun'ichi Nagasaki's Heart, Beating in the Dark (Yami utsu shinzô) is now online, and there's a downloadable trailer for the movie on that site.

As was previously reported here and there on ScreenAnarchy, Heart, Beating in the Dark had its world première at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) on October 2nd of last year, and its European première at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on January 25th of this year. It's a rethinking of Nagasaki's own 1982 movie of the same title (Japanese Movie Database entry).

Heart, Beating in the Dark stars Takashi Naitô, Shigeru Muroi, Shôichi Honda, Noriko Eguchi, Tarô Suwa (PDF file), and Kaori Mizushima.

Below is a description of Heart, Beating in the Dark from this page on the IFFR website.

A remake, a sequel and the making of Nagasaki's Super8 classic of the same name resulted in a gripping, many layered moral tale. What has become of the protagonists, 20 years later? How would a comparable couple now manage? And what does it mean to make a film about a pair of parents who killed their child?

The finest achievement in recent Japanese cinema, Nagasaki's film revisits the indie classic he shot on Super-8 in 1982. The initial proposal from the producers was a remake, another version of the story about a young couple on the run with a very guilty secret. After all, not too many people ever had the chance to see the amazing original. But Nagasaki had more interesting ideas: he wanted to see what had become of the original outlaw couple, Ringo and Inako, twenty years on, and to compare their feelings about their criminal past with the plight of a young couple in a similar predicament today. The original actors (then unknown, now famous) are happy to reprise their roles, but Naito Takeshi in particular sees this as a chance to revise the earlier film. He wants to criticise the character he played 23 years ago. Well, not so much criticise... What he really wants to do is punch the guy he used to be. The new Heart, Beating in the Dark resists any easy classification but its warmth and humour make it easy to enjoy. It's a searching, extremely moving meditation on the 'outlaw' mentality, on parenting, on 'growing up' ... and on the implications of storytelling itself.

Heart, Beating in the Dark trailer (downloadable 13 MB MPEG-4 movie)
Heart, Beating in the Dark official website