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After the success of her debut feature “Plan 75” in Cannes in 2022, Chie Hayakawa ‘s follow-up “Renoir” screens in the festival’s Main Competition, alongside 21 other titles. The film’s central figure is 11-year-old girl Fuki who lives in the suburb of Tokyo with her terminally ill father Keiji (Lily Franky) and mother Utako (Hikari Ishida), a short-fused woman plagued by guilt. Fuki becomes obsessed with death, and her fantasy runs wild with dark stories which she also puts on paper, not just in her journal but also in a school essay titled “I want to be an orphan” that shocks her caring teacher. The script penned by Hayakawa is inspired by her own childhood, but she will insist, when we sit down to talk about “Renoir”, that it isn’t biographical. “A large part of the story is fictive”, she explains.

Amp was curious to find about her interest in inter-generational dialogues,...

Filmmaker Chie Hayakawa made a quiet but unforgettable entrance onto the world stage in 2022 with her feature debut Plan 75, a haunting dystopian vision of state-endorsed euthanasia for Japan’s elderly. Selected for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, the film earned the Camera d’Or Special Mention and introduced Hayakawa as a director with an incisive style and a compassionate eye for human frailty. Now, just three years later, she returns to the Croisette with Renoir, an intimate and emotionally nuanced childhood drama that marks her first appearance in the festival’s main competition.

Where Plan 75 was shaped by conceptual clarity and social critique, Renoir is rooted in something looser and more elusive: the spontaneous feelings and fractured memories of childhood. Set in suburban Tokyo in 1987, the film centers on 11-year-old Fuki, a sensitive girl who retreats into her imagination as she watches her father succumb to terminal cancer...

Just three years since earning a special mention from the Camera d’Or jury for Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa returns to Cannes as one of seven filmmakers debuting in the main competition––an uncharacteristic breath of fresh air from a festival known for sticking with the old guard. In Plan 75, an acidic work of speculative fiction, Hayakawa imagined a near-future timeline where Japan decided to see to its aging-population crisis by introducing a voluntary euthanasia program. Hayakawa approaches adjacent themes in her sophomore feature, Renoir, a film about family, death, and intergenerational friction that looks not to the future but the director’s own past.

With all its quotidian detail, the appearance of veteran actor Lily Franky, and glacial pace, Renoir is a coming-of-age story that will be familiar to fans of Hirokazu Kore-eda, but there’s little (if any) of his sentimentality here. Hayakawa’s gaze is as consistent as it is observant,...

In the opening sequence, young Fuki stands before a chalkboard crowded with her own words, recounting her imagined funeral as classmates squint through the dusty shafts of classroom light. The year is 1987, and suburban Tokyo hums beyond those windows—a world in the throes of economic ecstasy yet quietly unraveling in living rooms and hospital wards. Eleven-year-old Fuki, tethered to her father’s hospital bed and her mother’s absences, drifts between hospital corridors and silent streets, each step measured in equal parts wonder and apprehension.

Chie Hayakawa’s camera moves with a deliberate calm, tracing Fuki’s gaze as she tests her nascent belief in telepathy or listens to strangers’ lonely phone-dating messages echoing through midnight. Reality bleeds into her fantasies so seamlessly that the mournful daydream of her own death feels as tangible as the sterile scent of antiseptic in her father’s room.

Rather than constructing a linear tale,...

In her debut feature Plan 75, which premiered at Cannes in 2022, Chie Hayakawa offered a quietly disconcerting vision of the future in which Japanese residents over the age of 75 could elect to be euthanized. At first the program seems to be benign, but Hayakawa’s film steadily reveals how the policy thrives on the cruel capitalist tenet that people are disposable. Plan 75 won a “special mention” Camera d’Or (best first film) prize that year and announced Hayakawa as a director to watch. Now, three years later, the Japanese filmmaker turns her considered eye to the past.

Premiering in competition at Cannes, Renoir is a poetic meditation on a crucial summer in the life of 11-year-old Fuki (a gorgeous turn by newcomer Yui Suzuki) as she navigates her father’s battle with cancer, her mother’s ambient stress and persistent loneliness. The film, set in suburban Tokyo in 1987, moves...

In the midst of a society that, as we are told by one of the characters in Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, is characterized by diligence and modesty, young Fuki Okita (Yui Suzuki) is living on instinct and imagination. Her father is in hospital, slowly dying of cancer. She thinks her mother wishes he would die a little faster or, at the very least, maintain sufficiently critical symptoms not to be sent home. She’s probably right: Utako (Hikari Ishida) is not a home body.

The year is 1987, before the internet came to swallow girls like Fuki. Instead, she retreats into a cacophony of cable TV’s dimestore gurus handing out advice on telepathy and hypnosis. She practices transmitting the suits on cards to anyone prepared to play; she tries to divine where the TV remote has gone. Perhaps she has the gift.

With 2022’s “Plan 75,” debuting Japanese director Chie Hayakawa explored a delicately dystopian cautionary tale about prizing one’s elders in a famously aging society. Absent that film’s hooky high concept (a government-backed euthanasia incentive program for seniors aged 75), Hayakawa’s follow-up brings her thoughtful, airy aesthetic to bear on a looser, less structured story, this time about valuing and respecting the eccentricities of youth. “Renoir” is a more diffuse yet in some ways more interesting sophomore feature, that follows where its lovely, mercurial central character leads and, taking a cue from the painter of the (rather tangential) title, lets the brushstrokes show to deliver a firsthand impression of growing up in 1980s Japan.

None of this would work at all if it weren’t pinned to the unselfconscious gaze of Fuki (delightful newcomer Yui Suzuki), 11 years old and already an original. Often left to her own devices but never bored,...

Acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, whose “Plan 75” earned a Camera d’Or Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival, is back on the Croisette with competition title “Renoir,” a coming-of-age drama set during Japan’s economic bubble of the late 1980s. The film is subsequently playing at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

The film follows Fuki, a quirky and sensitive 11-year-old girl played by newcomer Yui Suzuki, as she navigates a challenging summer while coping with a terminally ill father and a stressed-out working mother. The cast also features Hikari Ishida and Lily Franky in pivotal roles.

“Renoir” draws deeply on Hayakawa’s personal experiences of losing her father during childhood. “I’ve been thinking to make this story since I was a teenager or in my early 20s,” Hayakawa tells Variety. “But if I had made this film when I was in my 20s, I would have focused...

This looks like a winner. The first trailer is out already for a Japanese film premiering at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival this May. Renoir is the second feature film from Japanese director Chie Hayakawa, also at Cannes three years ago with her feature directorial debut titled Plan 75 (also a very good film that not many have seen). Renoir is an emotional, poignant coming-of-age story about resilience, the healing power of the imagination and a traumatized family struggling for connection. Featuring Yui Suzuki as Fuki in her first ever film role. Renoir is the story of an 11-year-old girl, Fuki, who lives with her father, who is fighting an illness, and her mother, who is busy with work in the summer in the late 80s. In addition to Hikari Ishida as Fuki's mother, Shiko, and Lily Franky as her father, Keiji – who have won numerous film awards – the adults Fuki encounters include Ayumi Nakajima,...

Japanese director Chie Hayakawa, whose “Plan 75” received a special mention at Cannes, has secured Indonesian powerhouse KawanKawan Media as a co-production partner for her upcoming film “Renoir,” it was revealed at the Hong Kong FilMart.

KawanKawan is collaborating with Japan’s Loaded Films, with Eiko Mizuno-Gray and Jason Gray serving as producers. Indonesia joins an already robust international co-production spanning Japan, France, Singapore, and the Philippines.

Hayakawa’s new film tells the poignant story of Fuki, a quirky and sensitive 11-year-old girl navigating a challenging summer during Japan’s late 1980s bubble economy. The coming-of-age drama follows Fuki as she copes with a terminally ill father and stressed-out working mother while encountering various adults dealing with their own struggles.

KawanKawan is the production company behind Makbul Mubarak’s Venice winner “Autobiography” and Amanda Nell Eu’s Cannes-winning “Tiger Stripes.”

“We are thrilled to work alongside Loaded Films on Chie Hayakawa’s ‘Renoir.