Akarui Mirai

Japan joined the battle for the Cannes film festival's Palme d'Or on Tuesday with a haunting feature by cult director Kiyoshi Kurosawa in which a jellyfish has a central role. The 47-year-old director's "Bright Future" ("Akarui Mirai") is the first to be screened of three films from Asia nominated among 20 competing for the Palme for best film to be announced May 25. In the off-beat high-tech feature, shot with a digital and a high-definition camera, a luminous pink and poisonous jellyfish is key -- intitially confined to a small tank then escaping into Tokyo's sewers where it multiplies and heads to sea. The two young heroes of the film meanwhile head towards anything but a bright new future -- one murdering his boss and killing himself in jail, the other taking home the jellyfish and befriending his dead friend's father, who deals in second-hand goods and scraps. Kurosawa told a press conference that contrary to appearances, the film set in today's Tokyo was not about a desperate purposeless generation cut off from the past and parents, with little to no future ahead.

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