As a work of fiction, Japanese director Yuya Danzuka’s Brand New Landscape would stand out as both an intellectually precocious and impressively assured debut feature. The 26-year-old became the youngest filmmaker ever showcased in the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section last month, where he earned widespread praise for his elegant interweaving of a Japanese family’s emotional unraveling with meditations on Tokyo’s ceaseless cycles of alienation and renewal. But what many Western critics overlooked is that the film isn’t merely an above-average entry in the arthouse family drama canon — it’s also a bold and provocative act of autobiography.
Brand New Landscape begins with a summer getaway descending into quiet desperation. Shortly after arriving at their seaside vacation home, aspiring landscape designer Hajime (Kenichi Endo) abruptly announces that a pressing career opportunity is calling him back to the city. The exhausted resignation in his wife’s protests makes clear this is far from the first time he’s prioritized his artistic calling over family, and their marriage is in its final stages of decay. As the father creeps off and the mother, Yumiko (Haruka Igawa), settles into a depressive funk, sideways on a sofa, their two children retreat into isolation, the son alone with his soccer ball and the teenage daughter taking refuge in a novel. Danzuka frames these scenes with patient precision, demonstrating a keen sense of spatial awareness.
The narrative then leaps a decade forward, finding the family fractured. Yumiko has died — by suicide, it’s implied — and Hajime, having left the children years earlier to work on prominent projects abroad, has found acclaim. The son, Ren (a marvelously recalcitrant Kodai Kurosaki), is now drifting through Tokyo, working aimlessly as a flower deliveryman, while the daughter, Emi (Mai Kiryu), is preparing to marry her longtime boyfriend but seems to have little confidence that the institution serves much purpose beyond putting painful family history in the past.
When Ren delivers flowers to an upscale gallery, he discovers that his father has returned to Tokyo for a grand retrospective of his work. Hajime has also signed on to a controversial redevelopment of one of Tokyo’s city parks, an ambitious exercise in cutting-edge urban design that will also entail the forcible removal of a large group of unhoused people.
Their chance reunion sparks an emotional reckoning. While Hajime remains emotionally obtuse and absorbed in his architecture and a budding new romance with an underling, Ren tentatively seeks a reconciliation, and Emi openly resists any reunion. Danzuka’s thoughtfully explores emotional vacancy — not only in the characters but in the cold, imposing city spaces they move through. As the camera impassively observes the transformation of Tokyo’s urban landscape, it becomes a metaphor for the characters’ internal architecture: fractured and alienated, but also beautiful and forever seeking reconfiguration through some inexpressible need to carry on. Throughout, Danzuka establishes himself as a formalist with a mature and impressively deft touch, using stillness, distance, and spatial tension to evoke the listlessness of Japanese youth and the lingering ache of familial absence. But in a country and culture that places a high value on personal discretion and family privacy, Danzuka’s full project is far bolder than this formal restraint would suggest.
“The characters are based on each member of my real family and the story is what we went through,” Danzuka tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the film’s screening at the Shanghai International Film Festival’s Asian New Talent competition. Yuya Danzuka’s father, celebrated landscape designer Eiki Danzuka, is widely recognized in Japan for his once-controversial but now widely acclaimed redevelopment of Tokyo’s Miyashita Park — the very urban landmark the young director scrutinizes aesthetically and ethically throughout his film.
“I’ve always carried complicated feelings about Tokyo’s relentless transformation, and the way the past is constantly disappearing into the future here,” says Danzuka, who grew up in the city. “When that unease around the urban landscape began to intersect with deeply personal emotions I have about my family, I realized I might be able to turn these connections into a film.”
He adds: “For many, the background — the city — is public, and family is private. But I grew up in Tokyo, witnessing my family change and Tokyo itself evolve simultaneously, and the feelings I experienced as both changed rapidly and beyond my control — it was all connected.”
Working with cinematographer Koichi Furuya, Danzuka crafted his distinctive observational style emphasizing how spaces shape emotional experiences. “The camera’s placement was essential,” he explains. “When viewing the world through the camera, the characters fill only a small area, with the city, architecture, and nature dominating the rest of the frame. By giving equal care to the spaces and surroundings as we did to the actors, we hoped to convey a sense of impartiality, which would emphasize their emotional transformations.”
From his vantage, Danzuka says the film is fully non-fictional, but he acknowledges the epistemological limits to his perspective, too.
“My father and sister carry pain similar to mine but different,” he says. “We all carry distinct feelings about what happened within our family, so it’s difficult for me to precisely say where the fiction and autobiography begin and end in my version of our story.”
While Danzuka had indeed been estranged from his father for a period, he shared the screenplay with him prior to filming and received his blessing to openly explore his architectural work and their shared history. His father first saw the finished film at its Cannes premiere.
“I didn’t speak with him directly at the premiere, but I heard he was very emotional,” Danzuka says. “Our relationship continues to evolve, like the characters. The film is about evolution, emotions tied to landscapes, respect for past generations’ memories, and the cycle of things vanishing and new things emerging.”
He concludes: “Before making this film, I hadn’t thought deeply about landscapes and spaces. It has deepened my appreciation for my father’s work — and I think he has gained a greater respect for filmmaking, too.”