Umi sora sango-no iitsutae

Makoto Shiina directs this restrained lyrical tale about a mother and her school-aged daughter. Both hail from the neon-drenched urban sprawl of Tokyo, but move to the remote Ishigaki island in the Ryukyu archipelago. Though the islanders watch Japanese TV and play Japanese video games, their culture remains exotic and their dialect almost unintelligible to the average Japanese. Initially, the girl's strange city-slicker ways provoke derision from her classmates. Soon she and her mother learn to love the idyllic tropical isle.