Intimate and revelatory, ‘Mitsuki, Sekai’ explores the quiet trials of girlhood

Japanese indie films generally have tight shooting schedules necessitated by minuscule budgets. The 2018 indie smash “ One Cut of the Dead ,” for example, was a wrap after one frantic week. By contrast, director Marina Tsukada is now about halfway through a decade-long project called “Toki” (Time), filming young nonprofessional actors in her native Nagano Prefecture as their characters mature from childhood to adulthood.

Obvious comparisons are the groundbreaking British documentary series “Up,” which has been tracing the lives of its principals since 1964, and Richard Linklater’s 2014 “Boyhood,” which featured the same actors filmed over the course of 12 years. Two fruits of Tsukada’s ongoing project are the shorts “Mitsuki” and “Sekai” (World), which have been combined into an anthology feature that feels like one intimately revelatory film, though the stories of its two segments never intertwine..