YOU ARE THERE
A FILM BY NICOLE WOODFORD
PRODUCTION GRANT - FALL 2018
Ami, 13 years old, a Singaporean Chinese and Japanese girl, lives with her grandmother in Singapore, struggles to cope after her mother, Satomi, returned to Japan years ago. When her grandmother loses her memory, Ami has to live with her father and begins to have premonitions of another devastating wave befalling Satomi’s coastal hometown. A girl with an uncanny ability to communicate with spirits, she journeys to Japan to warn her mother. Ami finally meets for the first time her uncle Isamu, an eccentric taxi driver. Both estranged from Satomi, together they begin a tumultuous road trip to find her mother, developing a surrogate kinship along the way. Isamu faces his own haunting encounters of his own. Ami delves more into the spirits she meets, especially a young boy who is searching for his own parents. Despite her increasingly troubling visions of the impending wave, Ami helps them reconcile with their own incomplete destinations before she can continue her own odyssey. Upon reaching the coast still devastated by a past tsunami, Isamu and Ami are told that her mother had passed away but Ami discovers the real meaning of the visions of the ominous waves through this encounter. Amidst the vast empty landscape, she will come face to face with the bleak truth of her mother's departure and discover the true meaning of her vision. Ami and her uncle watch as they create a bonfire to commemorate the spirits watching them on the shore, the sparks flitting towards the heavens.