European Premiere | In Competition
Japan, 2026, 119’, Japanese
Directed by: Koyama Takashi
Screenplay: Koyama Takashi
Cinematography (color): Saito Ryo
Art Direction: Matsunaga Keiko
Music: Soshitto
Producers: Ogawa Shinji, Kondo Tamon, Miyamor Shoko, Nishikawa Asako
Executive Producer: Goto Tetsu
Cast: Minami Sara, Deguchi Natsuki, Yoshida Mizuki, Hamura Jinsei, Kaneko Daichi
Date of First Release in Territory: January 16th, 2026
Non-Japanese are now happily snapping up houses in the Japanese countryside for next to nothing. But Koyama Takashi’s perky teen drama
All Greens demonstrates with acidic humor why that might not be such a great idea, at least from the perspective of adolescents bored to death with life in the sticks.
The characters’ ennui is real and relatable, though the story, based on a prize-winning novel by Namiki Do, verges on fantasy, particularly when its trio of teenaged entrepreneurs try to market their product.
That product, referenced in the title, and the name they choose for their enterprise, is marijuana, whose cultivation, sale and use in Japan is strictly prohibited by law. And when Japanese show biz figures are arrested for possession, actor Shimizu Hiroya being a recent example, their careers are effectively over.
Given its subject matter and treatment – the film could serve as an instructional video for growing weed – it’s surprising that
All Greens got greenlit. But Koyama, whose credits include the 2019 romantic drama
Colorless, steers the film away from glorification of the stoner lifestyle – we never see a character toke on-screen – toward standard coming-of-age movie tropes, from parents who are either embarrassing or abusive to awkward expressions of romantic interest.
The trio’s leader – and the film’s center – is Boku Hidemi (Minami Sara), a second-year student at a bottom-of-the-barrel commercial high school in Tokai-mura – a real-life village in Koyama’s native Ibaraki Prefecture. Hating her short-fused father, who makes life a living hell for her and her brother, Hidemi vents fluently and ferociously with an informal group of local rappers under her rap name Neuromancer, the title of a William Gibson novel.
A veteran rapper, the brooding blonde-haired Sato (Kaneko Daichi), offers to collaborate with her. Meanwhile, she forms a bond with classmate Miruku “Milk” Yaguchi (Deguchi Natsuki), a popular track team star, after Hidemi learns that Miruku’s life at home, where she copes with a mentally ill mom, is nearly as bad as her own. She also finds a friend and ally in Mako Iwakuma (Yoshida Mizuki), an aspiring manga artist whose parents want her to find a husband to take over the family farm – a fate she will do anything to avoid.
Together the three girls plot escape with their ticket to freedom being bags of marijuana seeds Hidemi has stolen – never mind how. First, though, they have to learn to grow them and sell the resulting “greens.”
On their road to success, the story blithely introduces various improbabilities, from their school rooftop greenhouse that no outsider ever visits to a teen gay couple they enlist to sell baggies at a nearby station, though how the boys recruit customers is a mystery.
Playing Hidemi, Minami Sara enlivens the film with a fresh-faced innocence and spunk that recalls the younger Non, so much so that I wondered if the veteran star and Minami were somehow related. (They aren’t.)
Also,
All Greens never loses the scrappy charm of its opening scenes, even when the girls get mixed up with gangsters and the movie, for a moment, becomes an actioner. But putting them in peril may have been the price the producers paid for getting the film made. Otherwise its moral would be that selling pot in rural Japan is the royal road to riches.
Koyama Takashi
Koyama Takashi (b. 1979) initially planned to join his family business after attending the University of Osaka but instead opted for film school in Tokyo. He worked as a production assistant at Pyramid Films and later as an assistant director and editor for veteran filmmaker Hayashi Kaizo at Eizo-Tanteisha. He made his feature debut in 2019 with the bittersweet romantic drama Colorless (2019), which premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival. His second feature, the quirky coming-of-age drama All Greens, premiered at the 2025 Busan International Film Festival and was released in Japan on January 16th of this year.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
2019 – Colorless
2026 – All Greens