In the opening scene of Christopher Makoto Yogi's lyrical family drama, I Was a Simple Man, the elderly protagonist looks out over densely built-up Honolulu and recalls when there was just beautiful green where concrete towers now cluster.
That sense of a spiritual connection to nature, cultural foundations and people long departed, even to the characters' younger selves, permeates this delicate, time-shifting study of a solitary man's rueful end-of-life introspection. "Dying isn't simple, is it?" asks the ghost of his wife, who died young, leaving him with sorrow and anger.
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