'Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter' - Rinko Kikuchi

[CHEЯNOБLY!]

'Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter'

Rinko Kikuchi (2006 Oscar nominee for Babel) stars in this indie film written and directed by Austin, TX based filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner. Although I've heard some say it is more of a black comedy, the trailer has the tone of a drama. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where it competed for the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and received praise, and was released (limited) in the US on March 18, 2015.

In the massive city of Tokyo, Kumiko lives in utter solitude. A struggling twenty-something, she works a dreadful, dead-end job under an awful boss, is intimidated by her well-off peers, and nagged incessantly by her overbearing mother. The only joy in her life comes from a grainy VHS tape – an American film (Coen brothers' Fargo) in which a man buries a satchel of money in the snowy Midwestern plains. Kumiko is somehow convinced that this treasure is real, and obsesses over its discovery.

With a hand-stitched treasure map and a quixotic spirit, Kumiko embarks on an incredible journey over the Pacific and through the frozen Minnesota wilderness to uncover a purported fortune.

Source

The film is based on an actual existing urban myth of Takako Konishi (you may or may not want to read this as it might give away some of the movie's plot):

Takako Konishi...

[Show spoiler](1973?–November 2001) was an office worker from Tokyo who was found dead in a field outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota on November 15, 2001. Konishi had originally arrived in Minneapolis earlier that month, traveled to Bismarck, then to Fargo, and finally to Detroit Lakes, where she died. Her death was ruled a suicide, but it was insinuated by the media that she had died trying to locate the missing money hidden by Steve Buscemi's character, Carl Showalter, in the 1996 film Fargo, under the impression that the film was based on a true story. The events depicted in Fargo, however, are fictitious.

Investigations by American film writer/director Paul Berczeller discovered the entire Fargo story had come about as the result of a misunderstanding between Konishi and one of the Bismarck police officers with whom she had been talking. The story was then inflated by the media, leading to the urban legend that she had come to America to search for the money in the film. Instead, it was discovered, Konishi had been very depressed after losing her job at a Tokyo travel agency, and had come to Minneapolis because it was a place she had previously visited with her lover, a married American businessman. Depressed and lonely, Konishi had been wandering Detroit Lakes when she decided to commit suicide with an overdose of alcohol and sedatives. This theory was bolstered by the discovery of a forty minute phone call she had made to her lover the previous night, and a suicide note she had sent to her parents expressing her intent to kill herself and that she had disposed of most of her belongings before she left Bismarck.

Source

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter Official Trailer 1 (2015) - Drama Movie HD - YouTube