@Blue Republic

I think I get how strongly you must have related to the content and atmosphere of the film - the displacement of one industry and way of life for another, and the trying conflict between cultures and environmental considerations, along with personal memories.

From my limited experience of the Cascades and Olympic Peninsula, the similarities of landscape seem to be more of mood, especially seen during the scenes of mist and rain. My strongest memory of the Olympic National Forest is of freshwater rivers running through forests of towering conifers and maples, with fern covered floors.

My enjoyment of the film came largely from the recognition of a lasting sense of resilience and integrity that still exists in many here.

I would love sometime to hear a little about your experience of the Japanese culture and people.

#2.3.2.1.1.1

for some reason or other, Wild Horses is not available for viewing outside NZ.

If you check the one comment at that link, it's something of a review that I wrote
some time back.

I was taken by the opening scene - late night big city taxi cab where the driver picks up a fare, young woman "exotic dancer" IIRC going home - and their realizing that they know one another - as I was driving cab myself at the time. The whole rest of the film revealing the events that led up to that chance meeting resonated as well, partly because I had grown up in small timber dependent town in the PNW (my dad worked as a logger and later the US Forest Service) so could relate to the situation in that respect - even the weather and landscapes were reminiscent of the Cascades or Olympic Peninsula.

The situation of a small resource dependent town having the rug pulled out when its major employer shuts down is familiar, too as there is an unfortunate history of that in Northern Cal, Oregon, Washington... sometimes due to government policy shifts but the result of corporate raiders taking over companies that had been acting fairly responsibly and then looting everything in sight.

As in the film, displaced workers are left with pretty stark choices - how people respond and what happens as a result seem central to the film's story - a large group opts to go to work hunting and processing feral deer for a German company for export. Others try to follow more independent paths - one group opts for trying to capture wild horses. Friction develops between the (former co-worker) deer and horse hunters - the latter have little success until they get some help from some local, umm, hillbillies? Not sure what you'd call those folk in NZ.

Of course, though - the system is stacked against them - the forestry service having secretly decided to wipe out the horses and bringing in some cowboy mercenary types to carry it out.

Am I remembering that correctly? Anyway, the dancer is from the hillbilly family and the cab driver is the leader of the horse-catching faction. Both are surviving, and retaining some independence, but on the margins of urban society, nothing like what they were working towards before and which should have been attainable were it not for the usual forces of darkness working against them.

I might view this differently were I to re-watch it, but I was impressed with their spirit at this point I still rate it as one of my favorite movies ever.

I've only seen the various trailers and some reviews of This Way of Life. They were living something like the protagonists aspired to in Wild Horses, living free and ethically and providing what appears to be a great upbringing for their children. But cannot help thinking how in the US that Children's Services and other authoritarian Nanny State types would likely be claiming that they were unfit parents and be trying to take their kids into foster care...

What was your take on these?