Miku Sakanishi has been thinking about forgetting most of her life. His feature debut, Memories, will have its world premiere in competition at the Tribeca Festival on June 6th, and will be released theatrically in Japan in late June. The film follows Utah, a man who travels to a rural town in Kyushu to help his ailing photographer father-in-law, while staying connected to his wife and daughter in Tokyo through casual phone videos.
The Japanese film is distributed internationally by Alpha Violet. The clip has been released.
This premise was born out of personal experimentation. When his wife was traveling abroad, Sakanishi sent her a video of his usual walking route, and she sent it back. “That interaction felt like a dialogue without words,” he told Variety. “Watching my wife’s videos gave me a perspective that I would never have been able to see on my own, and I felt like my understanding of myself had expanded.”
This instinct for images as communication forms the film’s central tension between the purposefully permanent photographs made in his father-in-law Makoto’s traditional photo studio and the spontaneous clips Yuta throws out on his cell phone. Sakanishi is careful not to judge either mode as superior. “We’re both just documenting our daily lives in our own way,” he says.
The question of what we choose to preserve, and what is nevertheless lost, runs through all of Sakanishi’s work. His groundbreaking short work won the International Student Creative Award for National Painting of the Year in 2013, but by his own account, it had very little story. “How can we visually represent the mundane moments of everyday life?” he says. “Our daily lives are an accumulation of small moments, but people tend to forget such small things, and that’s what interests me.”
In “Memories,” he built the script around the gap between capture and recollection. He argues that as storage capacity has increased, photography has lost some of its intentionality. “Sometimes I think, ‘Why am I taking so many pictures?’ Sometimes I look at a photo and can’t remember what it’s about,” he says.
The emotional core of the film is inseparable from his own biography. His father, Isaku Sakanishi, was a music video director whose work defined the form of Epic Records (Sony Music) Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. He died when Sakanishi was a high school student. Sakanishi says, “I couldn’t accept the death of a man who loved his job so much that he was rarely home.That’s why I decided to leave his death ambiguous and ambiguous and move on with my life.”
Choosing film as a career forced me to make a calculation. A friend and colleague unexpectedly released a video of her father, creating an unintentionally confrontational moment. Viewing those works triggered something that is difficult to name, rather than a critical reflection. In the end, he decided that emotion belonged on the screen. “When I look at my father’s work, I find myself thinking about the days I spent with my father and his death, rather than forming an opinion about the film itself,” he says.
When he showed “Memoriz” to his father’s former collaborators, he was surprised by their reactions. “They said to me, ‘There are some similarities to your father’s work,'” he says. “I was really surprised.” He didn’t believe the effect was there.
Sakanishi cites José Luis Guerin’s The City of Sylvia, Abbas Kiarostami, Sofia Coppola, and Edward Yang as major film reference points. In keeping with that lineage, Memoriz uses music sparingly, believing the contrasting soundscapes of Tokyo and rural Kyushu to convey emotional weight in place of the score. The climactic sequence with the music at the end was always planned that way and is a direct reflection of his father’s influence more than anything else in the film.
The cast pairs Tasuku Emoto, who won the Mainichi Film Competition and Kinema Junpo Best Actor Award for his 2019 performance, with Issei Ogata, a veteran one-man actor who was recognized by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for his role in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. The dynamic relationship between the two on set took on a unique form. Ogata improvised around sparse dialogue written by Sakanishi, and Emoto responded with what the director called true openness. “That dynamic reminded me of the relationship between Makoto, the father-in-law, and Yuta, the son-in-law, and I wanted to capture that atmosphere in the movie,” says Sakanishi.
Moeka Hoshi won the Critics Choice Award in the drama category for her supporting role in the streaming series “Shogun,” where she plays Yuta’s wife Yuki.
When asked what he hopes audiences take away from the film, Sakanishi keeps his ambitions modest and precise. “The happiest future I can imagine is for people to remember my name as a director and want to see my next film,” he says.
Watch the clip here:
