This melancholy meditation on love-its sudden appearance, swift disappearance, and the holes left in its absence-proved to be one of the Pia Film Festival's most successful works, earning invitations to the Rotterdam and Berlin festivals as well as New York's prestigious New Directors/New Films showcase. Resigned to a lonely life of flipping burgers for passing tourists, Ichio (Susumu Terajima, a Beat Takeshi yakuza mainstay) runs his father's isolated diner on the rural northern island of Hokkaido. Taeko is a young woman left at the restaurant by her cheating boyfriend; stuck with no money, she starts working for Ichio. A chance for romance seems to linger between the two; whether it ever dawns is one story, and whether it lasts is yet another. More fugue than film, Hole in the Sky is cinema stripped to its bare essentials, where sound and image unite to capture a universal sadness, one easily recognized by anyone who has ever loved.