Daiteiden no yoru ni (Until the Lights Come Back) (2005)

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A Christmas Eve power outage provides a collection of troubled Tokyo denizens the opportunity to come clean on the misdeeds of their past in director Takashi Minamoto's snowbound winter drama. Fourteen year-old Shota (Kanata Hongo) longs to get a better look at the winter sky, but upon peering… More A Christmas Eve power outage provides a collection of troubled Tokyo denizens the opportunity to come clean on the misdeeds of their past in director Takashi Minamoto's snowbound winter drama. Fourteen year-old Shota (Kanata Hongo) longs to get a better look at the winter sky, but upon peering through the lens the youngster is shocked to see a distraught woman (Yu Kashii) leap from the roof of a nearby hospital. When Shota realizes that the suicide attempt failed and the woman landed safely on a rooftop below, he travels to the hospital in hopes of making contact with the woman. Elsewhere in the hospital, a dying father (Tomoyo Harada) longing to see his true love one last time reveals to his son Saeki (Tomorowo Taguchi) that the boy is the product of a marital indiscretion and that his supposedly dead mother is alive and well and living in Tokyo. Already reeling as his wife (Tomoyo Harada) prepares to divorce him and his lover (Haruka Igawa) refuses to acknowledge that fact that he is no longer interested in her, Saeki prepares to meet his mistress in the very same hotel where Chinese bellboy Dong Dong (Tsuyoshi Abe) is preparing to catch a flight to Shanghai to be with his girlfriend for Christmas. In another part of town, lovelorn bar owner Shinichi (Etsushi Toyogawa) laments the loss of his ex-lover as adoring candle shop manager Nozomi (Tomoko Tabata) admires him from afar, and pregnant Reiko (Shinobu Terajima) nervously awaits the arrival over her one-time lover Ginji (Koji Kikkawa), who has just been released after serving a six-year prison sentence. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi