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A Japanese-Brazilian teenager forced to face a family loss nobody will talk about is at the heart of “Yellow Chrysanthemum,” the first feature from Japanese-Brazilian director André Hayato Saito, which is among the projects
at this year’s Tokyo Gap-Financing Market.
The film is set in São Paulo in July 2014, while Brazil is staging the World Cup. Erika, 16, is a third-generation Japanese-Brazilian who feels like an outsider in the country she was born in and wants nothing to do with her family’s roots.
That rejection stems from an old wound. When Erika was 7, her cousin Yam, who was also her closest friend, vanished during a traditional festival in the Liberdade neighborhood while Erika’s mother was looking after the children. The family has been locked in guilty silence ever since.
Erika’s friendship with Bianca, a Black classmate mourning the recent death of her mother, stirs up the feelings she has long pushed down. Bianca makes no secret of her grief, and as the two girls grow closer, Erika’s family can no longer avoid confronting Yam’s absence.
“I vividly remember being a little boy, sitting in the bathroom with my father, when I suddenly asked him where we go after we die. He paused for a moment and answered with a long and profound silence,” Saito said.
Growing up in a Japanese-Brazilian household, Saito came to see how silence in his family could express love and respect while also hiding pain. His short films have dealt with grief, memory, identity and life between two cultures, and he described the feature as a continuation of that work.
One of those shorts, “Amarela,” also follows a Japanese-Brazilian teenager named Erika who turns her back on her family’s traditions, this time over the course of a World Cup final between Brazil and France. It competed for the short film Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2024, was shortlisted for the live-action short Oscar at the 98th Academy Awards and won best live-action short at Brazil’s Grande Otelo Awards. It is part of a trilogy of shorts, with “Kokoro to Kokoro” and “Vento Dourado,” that Saito made with São Paulo-based MyMama Entertainment.
“I don’t want to offer easy answers or a conventional sense of closure. I hope audiences will recognize something of their own families in Erika’s journey, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, and reflect on the things that remain unspoken in their own lives,” Saito said.
The project, a co-production between Brazil, Japan, Germany and France, is now in pre-production after several years of development. It took part in TorinoFilmLab, where it won the TorinoFilmLab Production Award, and was also selected for Focus Copro at Cannes. The team plans to film a key sequence during a traditional Japanese Toro Nagashi ceremony in Brazil in November this year.
Producer Mayra Faour Auad is the founder of MyMama Entertainment and produced “Amarela.” She has more than 20 credits, most of them international co-productions. MyMama is developing “Yellow Chrysanthemum” with One Two Films, Loaded Films and Blue Monday.
In Tokyo, Faour Auad said the team wants to close the film’s financing gap and connect with producers, distributors and sales agents who could carry the film to audiences around Asia.
“Given the film’s Japanese-Brazilian roots, finding an audience in Japan has particular meaning for us,” Faour Auad said.
Saito is also developing his second feature, “Little Faults,” which earned a spot in Turin’s Boost IT Lab this year. Its protagonist is an aging Japanese-Brazilian woman living in Japan who starts committing minor offenses, hoping to land in prison, where she thinks she might at last be cared for and feel she belongs.
The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market runs as part of TIFFCOM, the content market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival.
