In the rustic countryside of the north shore of O’ahu, Hawai’i, an elderly man facing the end of his life is visited by the ghosts of his past. The ghosts also haunt the countryside, journeying from the high-rises of contemporary Honolulu to the pre-WWII pastorals of O’ahu—and into the beyond.

Blurring boundaries between past and present, memory and truth, Christopher Makoto Yogi’s hypnotic film is a life-affirming reckoning with death’s inevitability. Full of luscious images and sounds, moving to the gentle rhythm of a dream, I Was a Simple Man is attuned to the beauty of existence.