Cycling Chronicles: Landscapes the Boy Saw

Based on the true story of a 17-year-old boy in Okayama Prefecture, who in the winter of 2000 killed his mother with a baseball bat and fled to the north country on his mountain bike, pedaling for 17 days until the police ran him to ground. What intrigued Wakamatsu about this story was not just the rare and atrocious nature of the boy's crime, but his form of escape. Why north in the dead of winter? Rejecting easy explanations, from pop psychology or elsewhere, Wakamatsu retraced the boy's steps, trying to see what he had seen. In the wild, rugged mountains and sea coasts of Tohoku, he found intimations of the boy's state of mind. He also found the makings of a film. On January 6, 2004, Wakamatsu and a tiny crew started a 17-day shoot that approximated the boy's route, though their starting and ending points (Ikebukuro and the northern tip of Honshu) were different. They filmed on the fly, without a script, though Wakamatsu and three collaborators wrote one later.