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Likely the strangest entry at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, the surreal “Kefi,” the debut feature by cinematographer Saito Kisin, mixes multiple short stories and multiple styles to make sense of the feelings
around a complicated relationship with his late father.
It doesn’t get there through the signifiers one might anticipate: there are aliens, dinosaurs, dream affairs and more across the film’s compact runtime. “Kefi” plays in the festival’s Nippon Cinema Now section.
“Initially, I wanted to do four series of short films and put it together, and that would become a feature,” Saito says. “And those four would all have individual themes. So the first one would be ethics. Second would be hypocrisy. There would be discrimination, and fourth would be life and death.”
The youngest of three brothers, Saito intended to loosely connect the project to his own family, with his shorts following three sisters instead. Then, in 2024, he received news that his father had died.
That news is echoed in the film’s opening. Shortly after a scene in which their absent father speaks about them in narration, an echo from beyond the grave, three sisters – oldest Kyo, middle child Asumi and youngest Kino – learn of his death. Like Saito’s own father, the girls’ father had been separated from the family since their parents’ divorce.
“To tell you the truth, when my father passed, I didn’t feel sad,” Saito says. “Well, the reason being my parents divorced about 10 years ago, I haven’t met him for about 10 or so years.”
The film’s listing in the Tokyo program is upfront about its aim to explore the complicated feelings that follow a loss, including numbness. Saito explores that through the oddball humor that drives much of “Kefi.”
“I’m an optimistic person; my father was a very funny guy. That also added to the fact that there wasn’t much grief in his loss, and I thought that I would meet again with him and talk with him again soon, but that became so sudden,” Saito says. “I realized that not everybody goes through grief when they lose their loved ones. So that idea came to me, and I wanted to depict that perspective through the three sisters.”
The three sisters spend much of the film’s runtime apart, rather than the film exploring an overlapping dynamic between them. “Just because you’re family, you’re not always together, it’s not like you always share something, always,” Saito says. “Your siblings lead their separate lives, but at the very end, siblings or families think about the same things or have the same mindset.” One episode of the film eventually reunites them.
Those differences are embodied in the mixed visual approaches Saito takes, switching between vivid color and monochrome, and between chaotic handheld work and steadier camerawork. He didn’t set out to assign those looks along thematic lines, though he says the result allowed the imagery to carry different nuances. “It’s only because I wanted to test and try different approaches. That’s why it ended up as it is,” he says, adding: “I think it’s important that people stay interested and will be attentive.”
Saito’s experiments come from his hands-on approach – he is credited as director, writer, cinematographer, gaffer and editor – and taking on those roles mostly comes down to comfort, as it’s the way he knows how to make films. “That’s why my style is to use a single-lens reflex camera, I use iMovie and have my friends appear as actors. That’s what I use for YouTube, and I work behind the camera on bigger productions as well,” he says. “But when you’re on a big set with bigger productions, sometimes not everybody’s looking in the same direction, and so sometimes that becomes kind of a noise when you’re trying to make a film. And so what I really wanted to do was make a film only with people I really trust.”
The making of “Kefi” also perhaps reflects a desire to show a range of approaches that stand out from the international understanding of Japanese film.
“When you think about Japanese films done by Japanese people, people would imagine anime or films with [mainstream appeal],” Saito says. “But I think that’s a shame. I feel that there’s more interesting, more funny, more unique Japanese people in the world, so I really want to show that to people around the world through film.”
Saito says his multiple roles on the film may convey his point of view more directly to the audience. “I just want to prove that Japanese films are not only about those classic filmmakers like Ozu or Kurosawa, but there are more modern people like Hamaguchi, or even myself. That is my aspiration.”
