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Celebrated Japanese animation director Masaaki Yuasa has unveiled the debut project from his newly established animation studio, ame pippin. Titled “Daisy’s Life,” the feature is a Japanese-French co-production based on Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Hinagiku no Jinsei, with original illustrations by renowned artist Yoshitomo Nara. The film is set for delivery in 2026.

Yuasa is best known for his surreal storytelling and bold visual style in films such as “Mind Game,” “Lu Over the Wall,” and the Golden Globe-nominated “Inu-Oh.” He launched ame pippin in February 2025 with the goal of pushing artistic boundaries in the animation world. Backed by heavyweights Asmik Ace, Inc., Aniplex Inc. and CoMix Wave Films, the Tokyo-based studio aims to be a major force in the ever-evolving global animation landscape.

“Daisy’s Life” follows the emotional journey of a six-year-old girl named Daisy, who loses her mother in a tragic accident and struggles to adapt to life with her aunt.

Producer Yamamoto Teruhisa, best known for the Oscar-winning “Drive My Car,” is throwing his weight behind “White Flowers and Fruits,” the debut feature from emerging Japanese director Sakamoto Yukari.

The film is selected for the Hong Kong — Asia Film Financing Forum (Haf), the project market that operates concurrently with Hong Kong FilMart.

The Japanese-language drama, currently seeking additional funding and festival screenings, explores the aftermath of a suicide at a Christian girls’ boarding school. The story follows Anna, an outcast who discovers her deceased roommate’s diary and encounters a ghostly flame embodying her spirit. After consuming the flame, Anna gains extraordinary dance abilities and begins unraveling the mystery behind her friend’s death.

“What particularly intrigued me about this project was how the script places the protagonist at the center, allowing the film to effortlessly transition between horror and coming-of-age genres,” Yamamoto explained. “Despite these shifts, it consistently portrays...

On a bright summer day in a tent on top of the sultry clay courts that give the Tennis Club Venezia its name, writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi––known for his searing stories of love and longing and a taut, cryptic cinematic style all his own––saunters in tired but ready to talk, bags heavy under his eyes, tennis balls whopping back and forth in the distance. It’s 2023 and we’re on the Lido at the 80th Venice Film Festival. Hamaguchi’s latest feature Evil Does Not Exist has just debuted in competition to uncharacteristically rapturous applause.

The prolific, self-made Japanese auteur burst onto the scene at Locarno in 2015 with the success of the five-plus-hour Happy Hour. But despite the newfound popularity, Hamaguchi was a veteran. He’d already written and directed ten features and eight shorts, often teaming up with universities and research organizations that funded his crisp, sharp, sensitive...

In 2021, an epic three-hour Japanese film captured the hearts of viewers around the world: Drive My Car. The winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival that year, Drive My Car went on to get nods at the Oscars, with nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and a win for Best International Feature Film. The mastermind behind Drive My Car is Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who first gained traction domestically in Japan when he was in graduate school.

Now, Hamaguchi is globally known, with movies like Happy Hour, Asako I & II, and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy getting a lot of love on the international film festival circuit. His nomination for Best Director at the Academy Awards made him only the third Japanese director to receive such an acknowledgment.

Hamaguchis newest movie, Evil Does Not Exist, is another addition to his fantastic filmography. The winner...

Charades has taken international sales rights to Hiroshi Okuyama’s feature My Sunshine and will kick off sales for the Un Certain Regard 2024-selected feature in Cannes.

Set on a small Japanese island centred on the changing seasons, My Sunshine follows two children who are complete opposites who decide to train together to form a figure-skating duo as their feelings for each other grow throughout the winter.

The film is the director’s follow-up to his debut feature Jesus about a young boy who leaves Tokyo to attend a Christian school in the countryside, which earned Okuyama the new directors...

Evil Does Not Exist Photo: Janus Films There are few things more bone-chilling than the real-life evils set upon our planet and its people each and every day. This is the type of horror Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is contending with in Evil Does Not Exist, the stirring and eerie follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2021 film,...

Evil Does Not ExistPhoto: Janus Films

There are few things more bone-chilling than the real-life evils set upon our planet and its people each and every day. This is the type of horror Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is contending with in Evil Does Not Exist, the stirring and eerie follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2021 film,...

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi retreated into a rural village outside of Tokyo to make “Evil Does Not Exist,” his first film following the global success of “Drive My Car,” which won the 2022 Best International Feature Oscar. The Japanese director found himself perhaps uncomfortably in the worldwide spotlight after being known for indies like “Asako I & II” and “Happy Hour,” and so “Evil Does Not Exist,” winner of the 2023 Venice Silver Lion and Fipresci prizes, is a return to minimalist basics — an ecological parable wrapped up with unexpected thriller elements, and a movie he shot in secret.

IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for the film, out in U.S. theaters May 3 from Sideshow and Janus Films, below. While “Evil Does Not Exist” wasn’t eligible for the International Feature Oscar due to its release date in Japan, Hamaguchi had a great run at the 2022 Academy Awards — along with the “Drive My Car” International Feature win,...

Ning Hao’s The Movie Emperor will screen as the opening film of Macau’s Asia-Europe Young Cinema Film Festival, which is holding its inaugural edition from January 5-11. Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail, recently a hit in India, will screen as the closing film.

The event has two major sections – a programme of masterclasses and screenings aimed at young directors, film students and local audiences, and a Works-in-Progress (WiP) Lab, which will be attended by international sales agents, distributors and festival programmers.

The masterclasses will be held by leading international filmmakers including several from the Chinese-speaking world – Ning Hao, Li Dongmei, Johnnie To, Yon Fan and Lee Hong-chi – along with Japanese filmmakers Ryosuke Hamaguchi and Shinya Tsukamoto, Russia’s Aleksey German Jr, Italy’s Gabriel Menetti, India’s Anurag Kashyap, Lav Diaz from the Philippines and Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi.

China Film Directors Association is actively involved in...

Following critically acclaimed films like “Asako I & II” (2018) and the one-two punch of two 2021 films, “Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy” and “Drive My Car” Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s reputation was sealed as a name that merited international recognition. But it wasn’t until the latter film, “Drive My Car,” which won three awards at Cannes that year, including Best Screenplay, and Hamaguchi received two Academy Awards nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay that he really became an international filmmaking star (he was the third Japanese director ever to be nominated for Oscar’s Best Director).

Continue reading ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ Trailer: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Venice Award-Winner Is Coming Soon at The Playlist.

Much of the world learned of the talent of Ryusuke Hamaguchi when Drive My Car miraculously and deservedly was nominated for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film, the latter of which it won. However, many cinephiles have been banging the drum for the director since his 5.5-hour drama Happy Hour, Asako I & II, and his earlier 2022 release, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. The start of his career goes back even further and now, never before released in the U.S., his second feature Passion will finally get a theatrical release starting at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center and LA’s Laemmle Royal on April 14. Ahead of the release, the new trailer for his Tokyo University of the Arts thesis graduation film, which he completed in 2008, has arrived courtesy of Film Movement.

The film examines a series of intersecting love triangles,...

Berlin-based sales company M-Appeal will be handling eight films by Academy Award winner Hamaguchi Ryûsuke made between 2008-2016.

The deal follows M-Appeal’s previous collaboration with Hamaguchi and producer Takata Satoshi, of Neopa Inc., in 2021 on the film “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which premiered in Berlinale Competition and won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. “Drive My Car” by Hamaguchi screened in Cannes Competition the same year, before winning Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards.

The deal includes “Passion,” Hamaguchi’s 2008 graduation film for the School of Film & New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts, as well as “Happy Hour,” which world premiered in Locarno in 2015. “Happy Hour” won the Best Actress Award in Locarno, shared between the four lead actresses of the film, all of whom had no previous acting experience, as well as receiving a special mention for the film’s script. Other titles...

Left: Storytellers (2013), Right: Asako I & II (2018).When the Covid-19 pandemic (which health justice activists have been calling a “mass disabling event”) waylaid plans to film Drive My Car in Busan, South Korea, Ryusuke Hamaguchi was initially unenthusiastic about his producer’s suggestion to instead shoot in Hiroshima. In Esprit, he explains his worry that it was too heavy-handed a location, both because of the city’s history and his own. Understanding why requires us to rewind to March 2011, when another social and environmental crisis brought into relief the major themes of his work, notably a focus on disability and its relationship to storytelling, performance, and the power and politics of listening.In the months following the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake, media outlets likened the Japanese government’s expedient response to Hiroshima’s miraculous rebirth after WWII. Meanwhile, filmmakers were seeding an artistic counter-response, documenting the individual voices buried under a homogenized,...

To complement Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s grieving, soft-spun vision for “Drive My Car,” which has received four Oscar noms including director and best picture, the choice of composer to create a melodramatic and delicate score was crucial.

Enter Eiko Ishibashi, an experimental Japanese multi-instrumentalist whose 2018 “The Dream My Bones Dream” was a turning point in an already decade-long career of scores for theater and short films.

Ishibashi’s 2018 album of haunting soundscapes and its electro-acoustic mix of noise, oddball pop, improvisational jazz and minimalist, modern classical music made her a cinematic force equal to Hamaguchi. The more textural and sweeping aspects of Ishibashi’s bittersweet melodies were an elegant match for Hamaguchi’s vision.

“It was a very unique experience for me to be able to create music with relative freedom and enjoyment,” says Ishibashi of her cinematic compositional scope.

After being known for crafting blunt, short films since...

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Japanese writer-director behind 2021’s epic drama Drive My Car, is something of a renegade: his breakout feature, 2015’s Happy Hour, about a group of thirty-something female friends, carried a fearless 5-hour runtime; and just five months before Drive My Car Hamaguchi premiered another film, the romantic anthology Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Drive My Car elevates a potentially sleepy premise—a middle-aged widower’s relationship with the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya—into the stuff of cinema history with its intricate dialogue, hypnotic editing, and a note-perfect soundtrack by Eiko Ishibashi.

Eiko is a bit of a renegade herself: her massive discography is littered with masterpieces of every stripe, from the Steely Dan-esque sophisti-pop of 2014’s Car and Freezer to 2018’s unsettling, engrossing The Dream My Bones Dream. There’s also, among many others: 2021’s ambient project countless dream; 2015’s live noise piece memory of a nearby factory; and her most recent release,...

by Earl Jackson

In 1969, Masahiro Shinoda released “Double Suicide”, his version of Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s bunraku (puppet) play, “The Love Suicides Amajima” [心中天網島]. The film was striking in its use of the black-hooded puppeteers, the kuroko, to move the actors and change the deliberately artificial sets. The film was a hit with the international art film crowd in that it proved that Japanese avant-garde narrative cinema was not limited to Hiroshi Teshigahara’s adaptations of Kobo Abe novels. In later years, it would serve as a viewer-friendly introduction to the New Wave because, unlike the more difficult works of Kiju Yoshida or Nagisa Oshima, “Double Suicide” -to repurpose Gertrude Stein’s judgment of James Joyce – was the experimental film that anyone could understand.

In 2021, Ryusuke Hamaguchi takes up the challenge of integrating classical theater with contemporary cinema again, in his use of Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya” in his film “Drive My Car”. At first glance,...

It's hard not to love a "little movie that could" story. Who among us could have expected a meditative, three-hour Japanese film about a production of "Uncle Vanya" could turn into a proper player this awards season? "Drive My Car," the latest film from "Happy Hour" and "Asako I & II" director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, raked in Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best International Feature. It is a testament to the expanding Academy membership that they would even have a film like this enter the conversation, let alone actually score some huge noms. Coming from a niche distributor...

The post Here's When You Can Watch the Oscar-Nominated Drive My Car at Home appeared first on /Film.

A tender, meditative drama that declares Ryusuke Hamaguchi a new master of Japanese cinema

Best films of 2021: the listMore on the best culture of 2021

In the year we got a ninth Fast and Furious movie, Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi gave us something at the very opposite end of the petrolhead scale with Drive My Car. You could call it Slow and Circuitous, but that would be doing his monumental, highly moving meditation on how life, art and desire intertwine a huge disservice. Vast in philosophical scope but intimate; beautifully controlled but pulsing with erotic undercurrents, it marks Hamaguchi’s emergence as a new cinematic master.

Liberally adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, it sees avant garde theatre director Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) mourning the death of his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) – whose infidelity he had just discovered. Accepting an assignment to direct a new multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima,...

Also opening: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’.

Sony goes up against Warner Bros this weekend at the UK-Ireland box office, as the studios look to continue a strong period for wide releases.

Sony is releasing Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 670 locations. It is directed by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters films and is a producer here. In the latest entry, when a single mother and her two children arrive in a small town, they discover a connection to the original Ghostbusters and the secret legacy the kids’ grandfather left behind.

The original Ghostbusters film...

Ryusuke Hamaguchi has been making quite a splash in the festival circuit for the last few years, with titles like “Asako I&ii”, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” and “Drive My Car” screening all over the world and winning a plethora of awards. Hamaguchi, however, is not a newcomer, since he has been shooting movies since 2003, with the latter film being his 15th. It is interesting, thus, to check the path that led him to the place he inhabits now in international cinema, and his third feature, “The Depths” provides a great chance to do so.

“The Depths” is screening at Close-Up Film Centre as Part of their Close-up On Ryusuke Hamaguchi Programme

Bae-hwan is a famous Korean fashion photographer visiting Japan at the request of his friend Gil-su to take pictures of his wedding. Things take a strange turn though, when the bride disappears, and Bae-hwan ends up...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Double Walker (Colin West)

If one is looking for some post-Halloween chills, Colin West’s micro-budget ghost story Double Walker mostly fits the bill, albeit with a few stumbles. Approaching the supernatural with a more grounded feel akin to Paul Harrill’s Light From Light and David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, the film tracks a woman in specter form (a stand-out Sylvie Mix) who tracks down those responsible for her murder. While the production’s limitations can be painfully clear at times, with flat cinematography and flashbacks that feel far too on the nose, the film eventually coheres into a compelling look at the sins of humankind and what may come after death.

Where to Stream: VOD

Happy Hour and Asako I & II...

Writer and director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi awed the 2021 Cannes Film Festival with “Drive My Car,” his epic, three-hour adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story. It’s certainly not hard to mine cinematic material from any Murakami story (see: 2018’s “Burning”), but Hamaguchi brings an ever-melancholy new spin to the celebrated Japanese author’s road tale. The film, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes, has also been selected as Japan’s entry for the International Feature Film Award at the 2022 Oscars. “Drive My Car” opens in New York City on November 24, followed by a rollout starting in Los Angeles on December 3 before heading elsewhere. Watch the first U.S. trailer for the film below.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of ‘Uncle Vanya’ at a theater festival in Hiroshima.

In the films of Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, pretending to be somebody else is usually the first step towards self-understanding. So many aspects of the rising auteur’s work betray his deep-seated belief that we have to allow for some fiction in our lives in order to leave room for the kind of honesty that “truth” keeps from us.

It’s a conviction that seeps through every stone of his lightly enchanted slice-of-life dramas, which are populated by characters that often use role-play, rehearsal spaces, doppelgängers, and the safety net of the written word as permission to reveal — or even discover — the buried essence of who they really are. That’s especially true for Japanese Oscar entry “Drive My Car,” and Berlinale winner “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which together are finally bringing the filmmaker the international attention he deserves.

“In my opinion,” Hamaguchi told IndieWire during a recent interview, “fiction is...

The Japanese film industry has produced dozens of directors that, over the decades, have been hailed by Japanese critics as masters but never became well-known abroad. Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujiro once got regularly named checked by foreign filmmakers visiting Japan; the locally renowned Naruse Mikio and Kinoshita Keisuke, far less often.

A similar situation has long prevailed with the so-called “4K” directors – Kore-eda Hirokazu, Kawase Naomi, Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Kitano Takeshi – who have collectively garnered the lion’s share of major festival invitations and prizes for nearly two decades, leaving a younger generation of Japanese filmmakers in relative obscurity internationally. Now one has decisively broken through the “4K” barrier: Hamaguchi Ryusuke.

Hamaguchi was this week interviewed on stage at the Busan International Film Festival by Korean star director Bong Joon-ho, on hand at the festival’s opening ceremony and again trod the red carpet, Friday evening, at the Asian Film Awards.

Filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, perhaps best known to international audiences for his 2018 high concept relationship drama Asako I & II, returns to Cannes with Drive My Car, another tale that requires a certain amount of commitment from the audience, with warm results for those that stick around for the journey. Based on one of the sections of Haruki […]

The post ‘Drive My Car’ Review: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Haruki Murakami Adaptation is an Unforgettable Ride [Cannes] appeared first on /Film.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival may have marked a big comeback moment for cinema, but dealmaking was a different story. All the usual North American players were at the festival, but only a handful of major deals materialized over the course of the 10-day event.

These included Neon’s acquisitions of Norwegian Competition entry “The Worst Person in the World” and Directors’ Fortnight winner “A Chiara” as well as Sony Pictures Classics’ pickup of the Finnish crowdpleaser “Compartment No. 6.” However, by and large, this year’s buzziest Cannes movies already had their distribution plans sorted at the start, from Palme d’Or winner “Titane” to Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” (A24).

There were plenty of lower-profile Cannes highlights that ended the festival without any North American plans announced. As theaters reopen and distributors eye new opportunities to experiment with an evolving arthouse market, we implore buyers to give these Cannes highlights a chance.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Asako I & II (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)

Full-fledged, complicated, rapturous romance is relatively rare in cinema nowadays, and one of the very best examples is Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, which uses its doubled lovers as a way to reflect back upon its main character, in all of her doubts and uncertainties. Deeply rooted in its present moment, yet prone to flights of fancy as transportive and unreal as any in contemporary filmmaking, the film delights as much as it aches, staying in close step with the turns caused by the whims of the self and the other, moving back and forth in rapture. – Ryan S.

Where to Stream: Mubi (free for 30 days)

Caro Diario (Nanni Moretti)

With Nanni Moretti’s latest film,...

Leading arthouse sales agency The Match Factory has announced a host of sales on Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car,” which premiered in Cannes Competition on Sunday and is a favorite with the critics.

The Japanese drama has sold to the U.K. (Modern Film), Benelux (September Film), Italy (Tucker Film), Spain (Elastica/Filmin), Portugal (Leopardo), Greece (Ama Films), Former Yugoslavia (Demiurg), Hong Kong (Edko Films) and Taiwan (Andrews Film). Negotiations are underway for North America, Australia and New Zealand, Scandinavia, China, Russia, Israel and the Baltic region. Diaphana will release in France, as previously announced.

“Drive My Car” follows Yusuke Kafuku, a stage actor and director, still unable, after two years, to cope with the loss of his beloved wife, and accepts an offer to direct “Uncle Vanja” at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There he meets Misaki, an introverted young woman, appointed to drive his car. In between rides,...

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelity

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s mysterious and beautiful new film is inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name – and that title, like Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is designed to tease us with the shiny wistfulness of a Beatles lyric. Hamaguchi’s previous pictures Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy were about the enigma of identity, the theatrical role play involved in all social interaction and erotic rapture of intimacy. Drive My Car is about all this and more; where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur. It is a film about the link between confession, creativity and sexuality and the...

Adapted by “Happy Hour” and “Asako I & II” auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi from a short story by Haruki Murakami, “Drive My Car” is a head-on collision between an emerging filmmaker fascinated by the interior lives of women, and a famous author who… is not. But these two wildly disparate storytellers aren’t the only people vying for control of the wheel in this beguiling three-hour gem, as a third major figure is soon introduced to help steer them in the same direction: legendary playwright Anton Chekhov.

And why not? If the brief and uneven history of Murakami adaptations has taught us anything, it’s that the sensually aloof solipsism of his writing is best interpreted by people who aren’t afraid to impose their own will upon it. That’s what Lee Chang-dong did with “Burning,” and that’s what Hamaguchi does here. The result is — an intimate stage whisper...

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s new opus “Drive My Car,” one of just two Asian titles competing for the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes Film Festival, consists of three melancholy hours of conversations, but it says the most in its moments of silence.

In an interview ahead of the film’s debut on the Croisette, Hamaguchi notes that his past works have often been described as “really chatty” due to their numerous long, meandering exchanges. Here, in his largest-scale production to date, it’s the unspoken subtext that steals the show.

“A big theme of mine is really about how communication doesn’t necessarily arise only because there are words,” he says. “I think a lot about how I can effectively use silences in my films, because to me, silence doesn’t necessarily mean two people are not communicating or have no relationship.”

“Drive My Car” is an adaptation...

Next month’s Mubi lineup has been unveiled and if you can’t make it to Cannes Film Festival, they are spotlighting recent favorites from the event. As part of a Cannes Takeover series, they will show Lisandro Alonso’s Viggo Mortensen-led Jauja, the Zambian drama I Am Not a Witch, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm, plus two films from directors who have new films in this year’s lineup, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II and Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre, plus more.

Also in the lineup will be the Mubi debut of Magnus van Horn’s Sweat, which opens in theaters today, plus series on Jean-Claude Carriére and Luis Buñuel’s collaboration and a trio of films by the prolific Chilean master Raúl Ruiz. There will also be some recent festival favorites, including Arab Blues starring Golshifteh Farahani...

Exclusive: The Match Factory has boarded international rights to Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s (Asako I & II) anticipated Haruki Murakami short story adaptation Drive My Car.

The film, currently in final post-production, centres on stage actor and director Yusuke Kafuku, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima (Dolls). Two years after the sudden death of his playwright wife, he is asked to direct Uncle Vanja at a theater festival in Hiroshima, where a mostly silent young woman (Toko Miura) is appointed to chauffeur him in his red Saab 900. In between rides, secrets from the past and heartfelt confessions are unveiled.

Writer-director Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II played in Cannes Competition in 2018 and he recently won the Best Director Silver Bear award for Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy at this year’s Berlinale. He also co-wrote Venice 2020 winner Wife Of A Spy.

Drive My Car has been tipped for inclusion at this year’s Cannes Film Festival,...

With Happy Hour and Asako I & II director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s stellar triptych Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy picked up for a U.S. release by Film Movement, we’re now looking to see when his second film of 2021, the Haruki Murakami adaptation Drive My Car, will premiere and get acquired. With rumors of a 170-minute runtime, the first teaser has now arrived.

Starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Masaki Okada, and Reika Kirishima, it was reported the story follows a stage actor and director happily married to his playwright wife. Then one day the wife disappears and, two years later, the hero is appointed the director of a theater festival in Hiroshima. There he is assigned a mostly silent young woman chauffeur, an encounter with more significance than he at first expects.

With a Japanese release planned for this summer, we imagine it may time up with a festival debut at Cannes.

Following up the stellar Happy Hour and Asako I & II, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s streak continued last month with the premiere of his latest film, the triptych Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Meant to be a small-scale project filmed while he prepared his next film, we’re hoping U.S. distribution for his Berlinale premiere arrives soon, but in the meantime, we have the first look at his second feature of 2021.

Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, staring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Masaki Okada, and Reika Kirishima, is adapted from Haruki Murakami’s story, first published in the English-language anthology Men Without Women. With the film now completed, it was reported the story follows a stage actor and director happily married to his playwright wife. Then one day the wife disappears and, two years later, the hero is appointed the director of a theater festival in Hiroshima. There he is assigned a mostly silent young woman chauffeur,...

Following his win of the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the recently concluded Berlin Film Festival for “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” 42-year-old Hamaguchi Ryusuke suddenly finds himself catapulted to the directorial front ranks in his native Japan.

It’s not that he’s exactly obscure there: Hamaguchi’s 2018 romantic drama “Asako I & II” was selected for the Cannes competition while his 2015 breakthrough, the five-hour-plus drama “Happy Hour,” won a group best actress prize for its four leads at Locarno, as well as other awards that raised his profile at home and abroad.

Rather, in an industry and society that view a major foreign prize as a big status boost, Hamaguchi’s future plans are now a matter of keen media interest.

In a group conference for the Japanese press on March 6, Hamaguchi said that the three-part anthology “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is part of a seven shorts project.

Berlin Grand Jury Prize winner “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s deft three-story reflection on chance, the legacy of love and the contrariness of erotic desire, has clinched further key territory sales for its sales agent M-Appeal World Sales.

The new deal unveil comes as the feature has just been selected for this year’s Bafici festival in Argentina, one of the most important in Latin America.

Fast on the footsteps of clinching the top Berlinale 2021 Silver Bear in March 5’s Berlin prize announcement, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” this week closed Spain with Enrique González-Kuhn’s Caramel Films, Brazil, with the Belas Artes Group, China with Jetsen Huashi Wangju (Changzhou) Cultural Media Co, and Hong Kong, for theatrical distribution, with Edko Films.

The deals add to strong first sales to France (Diaphana), Korea (GreenNarae Media), Portugal (Leopardo Filmes), Taiwan (Andrews Films), Benelux (September Film) and StraDa Films (Greece).

Spain,...

European A-list festivals have rolled their red carpets multiple times for Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who started conquering the Old Continent with his graduation film “Passion” in the official selection of San Sebastian in 2008. Three years later, he was in the official selection of Locarno with “Sound of Waves”, and in 2015 – in Locarno again – his film “Happy Hour” won the awards for Best Actress and Special Mention for Script. Cannes welcomed him in the official competition in 2018 with “Asako I & II”, and now he’s in the main competition of Berlinale with his omnibus “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy”, consisting of three short films dealing with the theme of coincidence and imagination.

We had the opportunity to talk to the director about his ideas and inspirations in a generous one-on-one interview, due to this year’s special circumstances – done over a Zoom call.

”Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is a film...

Sales agent M-Appeal has closed further territory deals for Japanese filmmaker Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which just won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

Benelux rights have gone to September Film, and StraDa Films has picked the film up in Greece. September Film plans to release the title theatrically post pandemic. StraDa Films is planning a theatrical release “when the situation allows.”

M-Appeal previously closed deals for France to Diaphana, which plans a theatrical release in the second semester of 2021, with 80 to 150 prints; Portugal to Leopardo Filmes, which plans a theatrical release in November 2021; Korea to GreenNarae Media, which is planning to release the film in theaters in fall or early winter of 2021, “ideally on 100 screens or more if the pandemic situation allows”; and Taiwan to Andrews Films, which is planning a theatrical release in fall or winter 2021.

M-Appeal is in...

Maren Eggert and Lilla Kizlinger win first ever gender-neutral acting awards.

The Golden Bear for best film at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival has been won by Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn.

Scroll down for full list of winners

The social satire was shot in Romania during the summer of 2020 during a lull in the pandemic, and stars Katia Pascariu as a school teacher who finds her career and reputation on the line after a personal sex tape is leaked onto the Internet. Heretic Outreach handles sales.

Romanian filmmaker Jude was last in competition at the...

Ryusuke Hamaguchi brings a gentle warmth to this ingenious collection of three stories united by themes of fate and mystery

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a Japanese film-maker whose work I first encountered in 2018 with his doppelgänger romance Asako I & II and indirectly via last year’s experimental chamber-piece Domains, whose screenwriter Tomoyuki Takahashi has worked with Hamaguchi. Now he has unveiled this ingenious, playful, sparklingly acted and thoroughly entertaining portmanteau collection of three movie tales.

Their themes and ideas are emerging as keynotes for this director: fate and coincidence, identity and role-play, and the mysteries of erotic pleasure and desire. There is a rather European flavour in the mix – one of its characters is a specialist in French literature – and I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Carrère and Milan Kundera. And although there is no formal connection between the stories (other than the thematic echoes) the simple act of juxtaposition creates something pleasingly cohesive.

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi may be known for his deep explorations of women in love, but he never set out to specifically chronicle female intimacy.

The filmmaker made his name with 2015’s epic five-hour-long “Happy Hour,” which follows the friendships and lives of four middle-class women in their thirties, followed by the unconventional love story “Asako I & II,” which competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018.

He has returned to similar territory in a new fashion in his latest work, “A Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which premiered in competition at this year’s Berlinale. The film once again returns to the subject of female relationships, but this time in a series of three tight, unrelated shorts tied together by the theme of “coincidence.”

“It’s not my intention to portray only women; I’m interested in men, too. It just happens,” he laughed.

His mission, as he describes it,...

Short stories don’t often get the respect they deserve, and short films — which the film industry has deemed worthless rather than figure out how to monetize — don’t often get any respect at all. Unless, that is, several of them are packaged to resemble a feature, like three kids stacked on top of each other inside a trenchcoat and trying to pass for a single adult.

A playful triptych of self-contained vignettes (complete with their own credit blocks) that are bound together by a shared fascination with memory, coincidence, and the deep truths that shallow lies tend to uncover, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s wonderfully beguiling “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is neither fish nor fowl. It feels more like a single film than it does a trio of smaller ones that have been stitched together into a makeshift anthology, but the finished product is only greater than the sum of...

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is cinema portmanteau: three short stories focused on three different characters, each a little lovesick and just a little lost. The director is Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, an emerging filmmaker from Japan who seems to have already mastered his craft, and whose work is perfectly at home to such dilemmas. His 2015 film Happy Hour, a five-hour saga, followed the lives of four women in Kobe, one of whom had filed for divorce. Next came Asako I & II in 2018, an adaptation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s novel about a woman who starts seeing a man who looks exactly like the boy she loved when she was younger––a story of doppelgängers, it also showcased his touch for surrealist flourishes.

While fast closing in on auteur status, Hamaguchi’s films continue to hold a kind of literary spirit: Happy Hour the epic; Asako the novella; and now Wheel of Fortune,...

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi won wide acclaim and festival prizes with his 2015 breakthrough feature, the bittersweet ensemble drama Happy Hour. But the nuanced, novelistic eye behind that delicately observed five-hour epic seemed to desert Hamaguchi on his 2018 anti-romance Asako I & II, which premiered to lukewarm reviews in Cannes. Happily, Hamaguchi seems to have got his mojo back with Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a Tokyo-set triptych of contemporary chamber dramas. Each of the three plots is shaped by chance and coincidence, doubles and echoes.

Featuring a mostly female headline cast and a talk-heavy script, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is ...

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi won wide acclaim and festival prizes with his 2015 breakthrough feature, the bittersweet ensemble drama Happy Hour. But the nuanced, novelistic eye behind that delicately observed five-hour epic seemed to desert Hamaguchi on his 2018 anti-romance Asako I & II, which premiered to lukewarm reviews in Cannes. Happily, Hamaguchi seems to have got his mojo back with Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a Tokyo-set triptych of contemporary chamber dramas. Each of the three plots is shaped by chance and coincidence, doubles and echoes.

Featuring a mostly female headline cast and a talk-heavy script, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is ...

One of the few things that may be keeping Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2015 film Happy Hour from being recognized as one of the great films of the 2010s is its length: At over five hours, its drama of mid-30s women wrestling with their place in life is undoubtedly imposing, regardless of the fact that Hamaguchi’s style is clean and crisp, underscored by shadows of mystery, with none of the arduous challenge usually presented by lengthy art films. Possibly if it had been presented in the format of a multi-episode series, its audience would have easily found it. Hamaguchi’s follow-up, Asako I & II, broke things up cleverly by segmenting its Vertigo-esque story of lovers lost and found into two parts. Now, the Japanese director’s latest, the sly and intriguing portmanteau Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which is premiering in Berlin's main competition, helps the audience by being...

High anticipation for a new Ryūsuke Hamaguchi film is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Japanese director completed his debut film Passion around the tail end of the Bush administration, but it took until the release of Happy Hour, his five-hour opus, in 2015 before he found international acclaim. The director followed that with Asako I & II, a widely admired adaptation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s novel that was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or in 2018.

Premiering in competition this week at the online Berlin Film Festival, his latest is Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a thematically intertwined series of three short stories that follows a trio of characters in differing states of longing. As a work of art it is overwhelmingly beautiful, a spiky dialectic on modern love that is as deeply moving as it is expertly crafted and observed–and possibly his finest film yet. On a Zoom...

Diaphana has taken French rights to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s drama.

On the eve of the EFM, Berlin-based sales outfit m-appeal has announced two key deals for its Berlinale Competition contender Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy in advance of the film’s world premiere next week.

Leading French arthouse outfit Diaphana will handle Japanese filmmaker Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s latest film in France and is planning a theatrical release later this year on 80 to 150 prints.

Other deals confirmed are Paulo Branco’s Lisbon-based Leopardo Filmes for Portugal; GreenNarea Media for Korea; and Andrews Films for Taiwan. All are planning a theatrical release...

M-Appeal has taken world distribution rights to Japanese filmmaker Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which has its world premiere In Competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer.

The film contains three stories, which share the theme of “coincidence and imagination,” the director said. “Please enjoy being surprised by the unexpectedness of the world.”

In episode one, Meiko realizes that the man her best friend has talked about as “hitting on her” is her ex-boyfriend. In episode two, a student who failed to graduate plots to ruin her professor’s reputation. In episode three, a woman meets a former classmate, and they share the feelings they have harbored in their hearts.

In a statement, M-Appeal said: “In a very auteur but at the same time accessible way, Ryûsuke playfully tells us about universal topics through coincidences happening in the lives of women in love.