Following the explosive violence of “Baby of Destruction”, Japanese film director Mariko Tetsuya has circulated to explore the devastation of different kinds of “dear strangers.”
The drama, which has an international premiere at the Busan International Film Festival, stars Nishijima Hidetoshi (Oscar-winning “Drive My Car”) and Guweilunmei (Black Cole, Thin Ice”). Contrary to the New York background, the film follows kenji (Nishijima), a Japanese professor who is desperately seeking tenure, and Jane (GWEI), a Taiwanese-American puppeteer who struggles to balance motherhood and artistic identity. When the young son Kai goes missing, the couple’s carefully constructed life begins to unravel.
For Mariko, whose previous film “Destruction Baby” won Golden Leopard for Locarno’s best emerging director, the transition to emotional violence rather than physical violence was caused by her return to Japan during the pandemic. “The starting point was on a plane that returned to Japan after a year in the US, after a national emergency was declared,” explains Mariko. “The world was suddenly changed and engulfed in uncertainty. I began to think about my family. It’s the smallest unit of society.”
The director deliberately separates from the “absurd violence” of his previous work, focusing on “tragedy floating around because they care for each other.”
The film’s visual and thematic language centers are the motifs of literal and philosophical ruins. Kenji lectures on the differences between the static view of Japan and the dynamic interpretation of the West in abandoned ins, carrying memories of past earthquakes. “For Kenji, who is studying abandoned ins, the collapse of his family marked both beautiful and fleeting beginnings,” Mariko points out. “I set this as the backbone of the script and built the story theme around it.”
The metaphor of the ruins ranges from Jane’s doll-style performances in abandoned theatres. There, a puppet larger than lifetime becomes an extension of her repressed emotions. In collaboration with Blair Thomas, Mariko developed the choreography so that the puppet show could serve as an emotional outlet for Jane. “It was essential for Jane’s personality to show both her passion for puppet shows and her conflict in balancing it with family life,” the director explains.
The film represents a true international co-production between Japan, Taiwan and the United States, filming in New York, editing in Taiwan, and multinational cast and crew. For Mariko, this experience strengthened the power of cinema as a universal language. “I approached filmmaking with that ambiguity in mind,” he says of the challenges of multilingual communication. “The crew and cast came from a variety of languages and cultures, so our ongoing communication was naturally reflected in the film itself.”
Nishijima brings his distinctive strength to Kenji, a man whose academic rog arrogance hides deep anxiety and despair. “I wanted to portray Kenji as someone who does his best to live in imperfection, a character that reflects most of us,” explains the actor. Having built a career spanning Japanese and international productions, from “Drive My Car” to Apple TV+’s “Sunny,” Nishijima was filmed in New York with a small multinational cast and crew.
“Through this experience, I was reminded that film itself is a kind of universal language and that when everyone shares a strong passion for creating something meaningful, it can take shape in a language-independent way,” he recalls.
Gwei Lun-Mei offers a similarly subtle performance as Jane, a woman caught between artistic ambition and responsibility for motherhood. The Taiwanese actor, who has worked in multiple film industries, has discovered a special resonance in Jane’s struggle with cultural evacuation. “I’ve been studying abroad myself, so I find it very difficult to be truly calm and recognized by people from another culture,” she says.
The puppet sequence became important to represent Jane’s interior life. “The doll scene was very important to Jane. On the one hand, they represent her passion, and on the other, they were like another soul,” explains Gwei.
At its heart, “Dear Stranger” interrogates the nature of love itself, especially the gap between feelings and expression, intention and understanding. For Mariko, this question was raised by the photographer’s assessment of Masafumi on Sanai Island. He “had no love, but he had love” when he worked with “From Miyamoto to You.”
“For me, love exists in the cinema,” Mariko says. “It’s not an easy to understand emotion. It accumulates quietly and certainly through countless human connections. It arises very naturally from passion and almost embarrassing to put into words, but it’s fragile, as if it might disappear unspoken.”
