Two beautifully tender performances lift this subtle love story, which washes away the residual haze of romantic cliché. Adapting the twinned portrait of solitude from an award-winning novel, Koya Kamura suffuses his directorial debut with shoreline blues and exquisitely vaporous watercolor imagery.

Between the hit wartime epics Days of Glory (about North Africans fighting for France during WW2) and Outside the Law (Algerians fighting for independence), Rachid Bouchareb made this intimate drama about the 2005 London terror attacks, which won the Silver Bear in competition at the Berlinale.