Sakanishi Miiku has been thinking about forgetting for most of his life. His debut feature, “Memorizu,” world premiering in competition at the Tribeca Festival on June 6 before a theatrical release in Japan later in June, follows Yuta, a man who travels to a rural Kyushu town to help his ailing photographer father-in-law while staying connected to his wife and daughter in Tokyo through casual phone videos.
The Japanese-language film is sold internationally by Alpha Violet. A clip has been unveiled.
The premise grew from a personal experiment. While his wife was traveling abroad, Sakanishi sent her a video of his usual walking route and she sent one back. “That exchange felt like a dialogue without words,” he tells Variety. “Watching the videos my wife took allowed me to experience viewpoints I could never have seen for myself – it felt as though my own perception had been expanded.”
That instinct toward image-as-communication shapes the film’s central tension, between the deliberate, enduring photographs made at father-in-law Makoto’s traditional photo studio and the spontaneous clips Yuta fires off on his phone. Sakanishi is careful not to cast either mode as superior. “Both of them are simply documenting their daily lives in their own way,” he says.
The question of what we choose to preserve – and what slips away regardless – runs through all of Sakanishi’s work. His breakthrough short won the International Students Creative Awards’ domestic picture grand prize in 2013 and had, by his own account, almost no story. “How could I show an everyday, ordinary stretch of time, visually?” he says. “Our everyday lives are accumulations of minor moments in time, but people tend to forget such minor things, and that’s what interests me.”
For “Memorizu,” he built the script around that gap between capture and recollection. As storage capacity has grown, he argues, photography has lost some of its intentionality. “Sometimes I wonder, ‘Why am I taking so many photos?’ and there are even times when I look at the photos I’ve taken and can’t remember what they were about,” he says.
The film’s emotional core is inseparable from his own biography. His father, Isaku Sakanishi, was a music video director whose work defined the form at Epic Records (Sony Music) Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. He died while Sakanishi was in high school. “I couldn’t come to terms with the death of a man who loved his work so much that he was rarely home,” Sakanishi says, “so I decided to live my life while keeping his death in a vague, undefined state.”
Choosing film as a career forced a reckoning. Friends and colleagues would surface his father’s videos unexpectedly, creating moments of involuntary confrontation. Watching those works triggered not critical reflection but something harder to name – a feeling he eventually decided belonged on screen. “When I watch my father’s work, rather than forming an opinion about the films themselves, I find myself thinking about the days I spent with him and his death,” he says.
When he showed “Memorizu” to his father’s former collaborators, their reaction surprised him. “They told me, ‘I could see similarities to your father’s work,’” he says. “Which really surprised me.” He had not believed the influence was there.
Sakanishi cites José Luis Guerín’s “In the City of Sylvia,” Abbas Kiarostami, Sofia Coppola and Edward Yang as his primary cinematic reference points. Consistent with that lineage, “Memorizu” uses music sparingly, trusting the contrasting soundscapes of Tokyo and the Kyushu countryside to carry emotional weight in place of a score. The climactic sequence where music finally enters was always planned that way – and reflects his father’s influence more directly than anything else in the film.
The cast pairs Emoto Tasuku, who won Best Actor honors from both the Mainichi Film Concours and Kinema Junpo for his 2019 performances, with veteran solo theater performer Ogata Issey, who received recognition from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for his role in Martin Scorsese’s “Silence.” The on-set dynamic between them found its own shape: Ogata improvised around the sparse dialogue Sakanishi had written, and Emoto responded with what the director describes as genuine openness. “That dynamic reminded me of the relationship between Makoto, the father-in-law, and Yuta, the son-in-law,” Sakanishi says, “and I wanted to capture that atmosphere exactly as it was in the film.”
Hoshi Moeka, whose supporting turn in the streaming series “Shogun” earned her the Critics’ Choice Award for drama, plays Yuta’s wife Yuki.
Asked what he hopes audiences take from the film, Sakanishi keeps his ambitions modest and precise. “The future I imagine that would make me happiest,” he says, “is for people to remember my name as a director and want to see my next film.”
Watch the clip here:
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