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.
