Brand New Landscape

Fresh from its Cannes premiere, 26-year-old director Yuiga Danzuka’s poignant family drama is an assured portrait of emotional and urban isolation.

It’s been ten years since Hajime (Kenichi Endō, Nobody Knows, MIFF 2004) left his family to commit himself further to his work. Faced with the prospect of reconciling with their father, siblings Ren and Emi – the former now a florist’s delivery driver, and the latter soon to be wed – have wildly different responses. As each family member attempts to build a new life and escape the pain they’ve carried to date, they must also grapple with a Tokyo that’s constantly reinventing itself.

Drawing influence from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Edward Yang and dotted with homages to Yasujirō Ozu, the debut feature from Yuiga Danzuka – the youngest Japanese filmmaker to ever feature in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight – reveals him as a keen student of cinema. The film is shot with a designer’s precision: its 2:1 aspect ratio is a key element of its geometric frames, while the city’s array of reflective surfaces mirror internal emotional terrain. Born out of the director’s own dissociation from the ever-changing nature of his hometown, Brand New Landscape is a portrait of alienation, estrangement and how humans attempt to erase the past, both emotionally and architecturally.

“A remarkably embodied film, deeply affecting – finding cinematic language for the complex pain of estrangement … triumphs in unpretentiously encapsulating personal trajectories; it taps into something universal.” – The Film Stage