To the Ends of the Earth

2019 ‘旅のおわり、世界のはじまり’ Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

A young Japanese woman named Yoko finds her cautious and insular nature tested when she travels to Uzbekistan to shoot the latest episode of her travel variety show.

Atsuko Maeda Shota Sometani Tokio Emoto Ryō Kase Adiz Radjabov Muyassar Berdiqulova Maruf Otajonov

Alternative Titles

Tabi no Owari, Sekai no Hajimari, O Fim da Viagem, O Começo de Tudo, 在世界盡頭開始旅行

drama

120 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 3

I adore those Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies that despite not being proper genre films draw on his horror background for their aesthetic strategies. To the Ends of the Earth is about, like most horror movies to some extant, the unknown and everything about it is about how Maeda negotiates with a world outside her own. It starts a standard sense of alienation and director and actress combine to push it in so many directions. To the Ends of the Earth has a lot in common with Kurosawa and Maeda first film in a foreign land, The Seventh Code, but that film was more overt in how it was using fiction to modulate her relationship to that strange space. The entire sequence that goes from the chjase to the phone call is as good as the best stuff Kurosawa has ever done and everything else is equally compelling. The earth tembles here.
Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★

Perhaps slight to some - and perhaps that is dependant on how much you find yourself relating to the protagonist, Yoko - it's nevertheless undeniable to me that this is basically a total, genre-shapeshifting masterclass in modern narrative direction, perhaps surprising to some given K. Kurosawa's reputation as a great classicalist. That hasn't really changed here, but what's most impressive is that the film is a series of "non-events" - virtually nothing actually "happens" in this movie. In the meantime, Kurosawa takes all the techniques he's mastered in his genre work and applies them to everyday anxieties, and it's this mastery of technique which brings me to one of the things I admire most about his films - you're never…
Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's To the Ends of the Earth isn't a horror film but it feels like one. It's about a woman in an unsafe place, stuck in a country she doesn't understand. There's a creeping sense of being unwanted, as if being in a crowd is the loneliest thing ever. The atmosphere of To the Ends of the Earth is therefore oppressive.
What To the Ends of the Earth manages to do so well is undermine our own perceptions. It is openly about reality TV and the fact that it's all a presentation. The way the cinematography alternates between being televisual and cinematic also emphasises this. The lead character is also a performer - singing, presenting, masking herself. Yet despite…
Review by yush

reconfigures kiyoshi's familiar ideas of negative space embodying an alien, antagonistic nature and stresses it as only the fault of our protagonist and no one else, much less the foreign faces that crowd the frame. while this is mostly an enthralling character study, it's also reminiscent of the wind will carry us in that it's both a beautifully composed travelogue of its own and a subtle investigation of what such a travelogue really implies.
Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½ 3

Okku, the free goat, not eaten by wild dogs at last. The beauty and dangers of the sea, the myth of the sky, the emotions of a song that leaves the theater and arrives at the mountains. God brings together those who love each other.
There is a scene in Sang-soo’s ‘In Another Country’ where Huppert talks to a goat using his language. They don’t really speak the same language, but they talked to each other either way. Freedom lies beyond denotation.
Crítica em português no meu blog.
Review by matt lynch ★★★½

Sadly the goat was sent to Jurassic Park.
Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★½

Apesar deste novo filme de Kiyoshi Kurosawa não possuir um tom sobrenatural explícito, fica evidente que, ao longo história, existe uma mística implícita na trajetória da protagonista.
Na medida em que Yoko, a personagem de Atsuko Maeda, vai passando por diversas provações ao longo da sua viagem no Uzbequistão, na medida em que ela vai absorvendo um sofrimento emocional durante esse trajeto, ela também passa a construir uma nova relação intuitiva com o espaço ao seu redor.
Existe uma jornada mística bastante clara nesse sentido. Uma jornada que começa com um sofrimento pontuado por diferentes situações de incômodo durante o seu trabalho como jornalista, passa por uma literal perseguição por agentes da lei e culmina em sutis novos estados de…
Review by Evan Morgan ★★★★½ 1

Part of InRO’s first round-up for TIFF 2019:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film is set — and which is indeed new territory, geographically speaking — but to this border zone openly contested by opposing modes, genres, and moods. To the Ends of the Earth begins as a kind of travel film, or more precisely, as a document of a TV crew failing to produce one: The host, Yoko (Japanese pop singer Atsuko Maeda, now a regular Kurosawa collaborator), can’t muster the pep required to perform her role as world ambassador for audiences back home, who are conditioned to believe that foreign lands uniformly provoke wonderment and irrepressible perkiness, when in fact disappointment…
Review by Sam C. Mac ★★★★

Since Yoko herself doesn’t speak the language, Kurosawa chooses not to subtitle the Uzbek dialogue spoken throughout To the Ends of the Earth, and this decision, combined with the use of a filmic grammar that often feels ported over from the director’s horror films (dramatic lighting, wide frames that emphasize an individual’s feelings of alienation, and eerie silences), serves to envelop us in the psychological space of a young woman whose emotional engagement with a foreign culture, as well as her careerist ambitions and her ability to be open with those around her, are subject to ingrained fears and anxieties.
Review for Slant Magazine.
Review by Eduardo Valente

Such freedom and "don't-give-a-fuckness", as usual with Kyioshi. Always keeps you guessing about where it's going, without ever making an effort. It's just how he flows, I guess.
In a way, it's as if "Lost in Translation" had its "Letters from Iwo Jima" version - except that by a Japanese filmmaker of course, which makes all the difference.
The fantastic in Kyioshi always comes from within, and his non-genre works make it as clear as possible. The depths of the human soul, the difficulties in sharing a world with others while each one inhabit their own personal universe. And have I mentioned the freedom?
Review by Lawrence Garcia ★★★★

Had the pleasure of interviewing Kurosawa over at MUBI Notebook. As Evan Morgan has before noted, Kurosawa is one of only a few working directors who would absolutely flourish in a classic studio system, and the fact that he considers himself "not so much as an artist, but... an artisan" (a fairly astonishing statement from such an accomplished director) seems to bear out that observation. All-too-brief introduction excerpted below:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth is a masterful film—all the more so for being masterful in the most unassuming of ways. The film originated as a commission to commemorate diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan, and to that end, it incorporates a number of the landlocked nation's various…
Review by puffin ★★★★½ 2

The process of inventing happiness. A crushing contrast between the earnest product and the more hidden, quiet hardship felt through Kiyoshi Kurosawa's raw examination of alienation. Michelangelo Antonioni or Jang Sun-woo are worth noting either for their colder and more distanced attitudes, or in Jang's case specifically, the sheer restraint on all fronts. A more minimal direction style; keep the waves of stylism consistently low without evaporating entirely. Such a strategy makes To the Ends of the Earth into a film defined by the beauty and the pain of its details. Abbas Kiarostami also comes to mind, with little narrative reflections like the goat or the theater sounding like something he would have done in allowing a character to unravel…

Recent reviews

Review by bruno ★★★★

mas tu também eh doida hein fia
Review by beehivemind ★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Shoulda let that family have their goat back.
Review by Michael Scott ★★★½

Kurosawa (the other Kurosawa) nails so much naturalism here: the language barrier, the culture shock, the understated cultural imperialism, and the nature. He also perceptively uses contrasts to heighten his thematic concerns: the switch between Yoko's on and off-screen personas is captivatingly (and depressingly) comic, as it the treatment of Okku the goat. Add to this the musical interludes and I was in heaven. The darker notes don't ring quite as true but, overall, well worth the trek.
Watched as part of March Around the World.
🇳🇿 🇦🇺 🇸🇬 🇵🇭 🇹🇼 🇯🇵 🇷🇺 🇸🇪 🇬🇧 🇰🇷 🇬🇷 🇩🇰 🇧🇪 🇵🇱 🇹🇷 🇺🇿
Review by Juan Carlos Hernandez Molina ★★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

The goat made it...and im crying! altough, i expected that. To the ends of the Earth it's a good journey as a tourist perspective in a place where you don't understand a word but realize we are very similar at the end.
Review by Ivinis Malta ★★★★½

O misticismo, a jornada, as pequenas e grandes agressões, tudo se encontra nesse filme.
Kurosawa, seu gênio lindo e impiedoso...
Review by Guilherme alves ★★★★

Vai com calma te colocando no ambiente e sensações da personagem.
Ela se vê em um país e cultura fora de qualquer coisa que já havia visto antes,um ambiente hostil onde ela se vê diminuída pelo seu gênero,presa e ressentida de ter opiniões. Em paralelo com a cabra se empatiza com o animalzinho e ve que todo o tempo ele o poderia soltar de suas amarras,mas seria uma tarefa que dependeria dela.
Review by sara ★★★★

thank you for this wonderful version of l’hymne à l’amour in japanese
Review by Tyler Bauer ★★★

I could certainly relate to Yoko's struggle of trying to experience actual culture in a foreign land without getting out over your skis and giving up. Threading that needle is a very particular feeling that was well portrayed. Regardless, you can't epic-closing-musical-number your way to profundity that you didn't earn, I watched the rest of the film!
Review by Ralph ★★★½

Dejando de lado el Uzbekistán out of context, la peli te sabe transmitir las ansiedades y angustias de un viaje que haces emocionalmente solo y en un sitio donde nadie te entiende. "Al final sí que tenemos suerte."
Review by Lil_Palmira ★★★★

Kyoshi Kurosawa segue sendo um dos meus diretores favoritos da contemporaneidade.
Desta vez ele nós traz a história de Yoko uma jovem repórter japonesa que está trabalhando em um documentário sobre o Uzbequistão. A jovem tem ambição de virar cantora em seu país e vê o trabalho como repórter como uma forma de exposição necessária para alcançar o objetivo futuro.
O tom do filme se dá pela dualidade da jovem que, ao ser filmada para as reportagens, se mostra como alegre, extrovertida e brincalhona. Já quando está sozinha ela se revela extremamente introspectiva e insegura.
Ao decorrer do filme vemos a jovem demonstrar receio de se aproximar dos locais. Logo no começo do filme Yoko nega se sentir incomodada quando…
Review by juan pablo baldessari ★★★★

Kurosawa, maestro del horror, da un giro hacia éste drama existencial sumamente entretenido. Una cantante frustrada, devenida en cronista de un programa viajes y rarezas, recorre (y se pierde) y se mete en problemas en las calles de Uzbekistán, tratando siempre de averiguar adónde la llevará este camino que transita.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa demuestra que puede nadar cómodamente en las aguas del terror y también en las de éste tipo de películas, en apariencia más livianas, pero de gran profundidad.
Review by jimthen ★★★½

A portrait of being trapped in out of place fear in developing country is parallel with being stuck in non dream job assertion.