Hanami

Winner of the Best Emerging Director award and a Special Mention in the First Feature competition at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, Cape Verdean-Swiss director Denise Fernandes expands on the themes that she probed with restrained eloquence in her 2020 short film Nha Mila (New Directors/New Films 2021) with her stunning feature debut, a beguiling coming-of-age fable that continues the filmmaker’s tender, emotionally precise inquiry into specifically diasporic experiences of displacement and belonging. Embracing a cinematic style of understated poetry and stirring oneirism, Hanami introduces viewers to the insular community of Djarfogo, where each successive generation is confronted with the dilemma of leaving for new opportunities abroad or staying put, perpetuating a way of life that all of its adherents seem eager to escape. It’s in this context that young Nana (played at different ages by gifted first-time actresses Sanaya Andrade and Daílma Mendes) navigates the onset of adolescence, all the while grappling with the ever-looming absence of a mother who left years ago, in the child’s infancy, to seek treatment for a mysterious ailment.