International Premiere | In Competition | White Mulberry Award Candidate | ONLINE
Japan, 2024, 99’, Japanese
Directed by: Michimoto Saki
Screenplay: Michimoto Saki, Goda Ryusei
Cinematography (color): Seki Rui
Music: Irie Yo
Producer: Ichihashi Koji
Cast: Tanaka Makoto, Okouchi Ken, Shigematsu Risa, Akiyama Takuro, Matsuda Ryota
Date of First Release in Territory: September 28th, 2024
Friends growing apart and lovers splitting up are staple storylines in Japanese indie films. A protagonist professionally outstripping her rivals, however, is not, though many young indie filmmakers have done exactly that by winning prizes and otherwise standing out.
One such director is Michimoto Saki, whose stylish and accomplished debut feature, See You Tomorrow, is about a gifted photographer who is accurately called “merciless” by a classmate and kind-of boyfriend.
Winner of a Special Jury Award at the Pia Film Festival in 2018 for her short 19: Nineteen, Michimoto has created a protagonist in the cool-eyed, unflappable Nao (Tanaka Makoto) that may not necessarily be autobiographical – on the film’s site, Michimoto describes her as the sort of person she “wanted to be” – but feels grounded in a lived reality.
Co-scripted by Michmoto, the film mostly unfolds in the type of arts college the director herself attended in her native Osaka, though Nao’s passion is street photography, not film. With an SLR camera strapped around her neck, she walks around seeking subjects, from a middle-aged guy awkwardly licking an ice cream cone to kids playfully eating in front of a take-out place. “You look happy,” the woman who runs the shop tells Nao.
Yes and no. We get a brief glimpse of her bumpy family life, with her widower dad working two jobs to avoid stewing at home, but the story centers on Nao’s close but awkward relationships with three classmates at her college who, like her, are aspiring photographers about to graduate and unsure about what happens next.
They are sure, however, that the talented and workaholic Nao is going places they aren’t – and that certainty leads to a tension Nao does little to lessen. Do they envy her despite all their protestations of friendship? Undoubtedly, though they try to hide it. High-volume blowups never ruffle the film’s low-key surface.
Meanwhile, their professor (Okouchi Ken) may look like an overage grad student but quietly commands respect for his well-chosen words and unerring judgements. He serves as the film’s reality principle, and the truth of the matter is that the charming, eager-to-please Sayo (Shigematsu Risa), the talkative, easily bruised Tada (Akiyama Takuro) and the sensitive, self-lacerating Yamada (Matsuda Ryota) just don’t have what it takes.
This makes for sticky going as pained smiles follow pained smiles in scene after scene. And yet Nao never becomes annoyingly superior. In Tanaka’s unfussy, on-point performance, she sincerely wants to stay friends with this trio – and maybe be something more to Yamada – but she never wavers in her determination to succeed, beginning with a scholarship that will take her to Berlin.
If this were all, See You Tomorrow would be a simplistic tale of the gifted triumphing over the mediocre, but the film flashes forward four years to revisit its four principals and a more rounded and poignant group portrait emerges.
Nonetheless, Nao is still snapping away, oblivious to everything but what she sees through her lens. And Michimoto’s roving camera follows her closely, revealing her essence but leaving her something of a mystery, much like Nao’s photo of her unlikely muse, Yamada, which expresses affection for her subject and demonstrates her talent for revealing character. But what really does she see in him? What indeed.
GUEST:
MICHIMOTO Saki, director
TANAKA Makoto, actress
SHIGEMATSU Risa, actress
ICHIHASHI Koji, producer
Michimoto Saki
Michimoto Saki (b. 1997) was raised in Osaka and graduated from Osaka Visual Arts Academy. After editing movie trailers, she joined the video production company Ellroy, where she worked on TV commercials and other projects. Her short film
19 Years Old won the Special Jury Prize at the Pia Film Festival 2018. She participated in the ndjc (New Directions in Japanese CInema) Young Filmmakers Development Project 2021 for which she completed the short
Nacchan’s Family. Her first feature film,
See You Tomorrow, was released in Japan in September 2024.
FILMOGRAPHY
2024 – See You Tomorrow