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 is among the projects at this year’s Tokyo Gap-Financing Market.
The film is set in São Paulo in July 2014, while Brazil is staging the World Cup. Erika, 16, is 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.
Erika’s friendship with Bianca, a Black classmate mourning the recent death of her mother, stirs up the feelings she has long pushed down. Bianca makes no secret of her grief, and as the two girls grow closer, Erika’s family can no longer avoid confronting Yam’s absence.
“I vividly remember being a little boy, sitting in the bathroom with my father, when I suddenly asked him where we go after we die. He paused for a moment and answered with a long and profound silence,” Saito said.
Growing up in a Japanese-Brazilian household, Saito came to see how silence in his family could express love and respect while also hiding pain. His short films have dealt with grief, memory, identity and life between two cultures, and he described the feature as a continuation of that work.
“I don’t want to offer easy answers or a conventional sense of closure. I hope audiences will recognize something of their own families in Erika’s journey, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, and reflect on the things that remain unspoken in their own lives,” Saito said.
Saito is also developing his second feature, “Little Faults,” which earned a spot in Turin’s Boost IT Lab this year. Its protagonist is an aging Japanese-Brazilian woman living in Japan who starts committing minor offenses, hoping to land in prison, where she thinks she might at last be cared for and feel she belongs.
The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market runs as part of TIFFCOM, the content market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival.
