Returning Home Means Facing Unfinished Business

Read Time:5 Minute, 9 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Akashi
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Genre: Drama, Romance
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director(s): Mayumi Yoshida
Writer(s): Mayumi Yoshida
Cast: Mayumi Yoshida, Bun Kimura, Hana Kino, Chieko Matsubara, Kunio Murai, Hiro Kanagawa, Ryo Tajima, Jess McLeod, Shun Sugata, Annie the Clumsy
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: AKASHI is a story that wears its duality on its sleeve—bridging continents, generations, and emotional timelines. Director Mayumi Yoshida transforms her award-winning short into a deeply personal feature, one that explores grief, romance, and the weight of secrets handed down through family. From the outset, this isn’t framed as just a homecoming drama but as a reckoning with identity. Kana (played by Yoshida herself), a struggling artist who’s been living in Vancouver, returns to Tokyo for her grandmother’s funeral. In that journey back, the film opens layers of memory and buried truths that ripple through the lives of those left behind.

One of the strongest choices Yoshida makes is to ground the story in lived-in details. The black-and-white cinematography reflects not only the solemnity of mourning but also the sense of distance Kana feels from her homeland after ten years abroad. Yet this muted palette is interrupted by bursts of color in key moments, symbolizing the intensity of memory and the stubborn persistence of desire. It’s a stylistic approach that never feels like a gimmick—it mirrors the way grief floods and recedes, allowing moments of beauty to break through, even in the midst of loss.

Central to the film is the discovery of her grandfather’s affair, a secret shared only between Kana and her grandmother. This revelation doesn’t function as a twist, but as a prism through which the audience can see how complicated love truly is. In exploring a decades-long act of betrayal and devotion, AKASHI resists judgments. The story instead underscores the push and pull between personal longing and responsibility, a theme that resonates not only across cultures but across time.

The romance subplot between Kana and Hiro (Ryo Tajima) serves as both a reflection and a contrast to her grandparents’ history. Their reunion is tentative, awkward, and achingly human. Tajima’s restrained performance conveys a man caught between past choices and lingering affection. At the same time, Yoshida’s portrayal of Kana reveals a woman struggling to reconcile the freedom she sought abroad with the ties that never quite broke.

Where the film shines most is in its ensemble. Hana Kino, as the grandmother, carries gravitas even in flashbacks, her presence anchoring the story’s emotional stakes. Chieko Matsubara and Kunio Murai embody the generational weight of tradition, while Hiro Kanagawa adds grounded warmth in a brief but memorable role.

At times, the pacing feels intentionally calculated—some viewers might argue that it is too deliberate. But this slow unfolding allows space for reflection. The film isn’t in a hurry to provide answers; instead, it asks the audience to sit with uncomfortable truths about love’s contradictions. The synth-driven score further emphasizes this, marrying the modern with timeless emotion, as if to underline how desire and regret don’t belong to one era but to every generation.

If there’s a commentary I would offer, it lies in how heavily the narrative relies on parallel timelines. The transitions, though often elegant, occasionally risk redundancy by echoing sentiments that have already been made clear. Similarly, while the film’s autofictional roots lend authenticity, they sometimes veer toward over-explanation—moments when subtlety might have carried more weight.

AKASHI’s achievements outweigh these minor stumbles. Yoshida’s direction declares her as a filmmaker with an eye for emotional nuance. She balances themes of identity and romantic longing without ever losing sight of the characters at the center. For a debut narrative feature, it feels assured, polished, and deeply personal in a way that few films manage.

What lingers after the credits isn’t the revelation of the family secret or the rekindled romance, but the way the film captures the in-between spaces—between countries, between eras, between loyalty and desire. AKASHI reminds us that grief is not just about losing someone but about rediscovering who we are in the shadow of that loss. For anyone who has ever felt torn between two places or two aspects of themselves, the film resonates.

Yoshida’s debut feature leaves no doubt that her voice belongs in the conversation of emerging filmmakers to watch. With AKASHI, she doesn’t just tell a story of one family but crafts a meditation on the universal search for belonging. It’s tender, flawed in places, but deeply affecting—a film that earns its place as a standout at this year’s festival circuit.

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[photo courtesy of CRAVE, EXPERIMENTAL FOREST FILMS, FLAG, HOLLYWOOD SUITE, MUSUBI ARTS, TOKYO FILM COMMISSION, TÉLÉFILM CANADA, WATERMARK MEDIA]

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