A Japanese-Brazilian teenager forced to face a family loss nobody will talk about is at the heart of Yellow Chrysanthemum, the first feature from Japanese-Brazilian director André Hayato Saito, which has joined this year’s Tokyo Gap-Financing Market. The film sets a private grief against one of the loudest public moments in Brazil’s recent history.
(Credits: Variety)
Yellow Chrysanthemum: A Grief Drama Set During the 2014 World Cup
The film is set in São Paulo in July 2014, while Brazil is staging the soccer World Cup. At its centre is Erika, 16, a third-generation Japanese-Brazilian who feels like an outsider in the country she was born in and wants nothing to do with her family’s roots.
That contrast is the film’s engine. Outside, a nation is celebrating, waving flags and living through a tournament the whole world is watching. Inside one family, a loss goes unspoken, and a teenager who already feels caught between two cultures is left to face it largely on her own. The World Cup setting is not just background colour; it sharpens the isolation, as collective joy makes private grief feel even lonelier.
A First Feature About Identity and Belonging
For Saito, making his feature debut, the story draws on a rich and specific experience: the Japanese-Brazilian community, one of the largest Japanese diasporas in the world, and the complicated feeling of belonging fully to neither place. Erika’s reluctance to embrace her family’s roots is a familiar tension for third-generation children of immigrants everywhere, caught between the culture at home and the country outside the front door.
The film’s presence at the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market, where projects seek the final financing to get made, puts it in front of international buyers and partners at a key moment. Gap-financing markets are where promising films find the last pieces of their budgets, and selection alone signals industry belief in the project’s potential.
Yellow Chrysanthemum arrives as a quiet counterpoint to blockbuster season: a coming-of-age grief drama about a girl learning that the family history she wants to run from may be exactly what she needs to understand her loss. It is one to watch as it moves from the market towards production.
Source: Variety — read the full story there.
