My Man

North American Premiere. Q&A with Fumi Nikaido, who will be presented with the Screen International Rising Star Award.

Based on Kazuki Sakuraba's controversial best seller, and directed by the award-winning Kazuyoshi Kumakiri (Sketches of Kaitan City), My Man is the quieting disturbing tale of two lost souls, a man and an adolescent girl, fatefully brought together by a natural disaster, in Hokkaido, the northernmost part of the Japanese archipelago. Hana (Fumi Nikaido) is only 10 years old when she loses everything to the 1993 tsunami in Okushiri. Promptly taken in by a 26-year-old distant relative, Jungo (Tadanobu Asano), the young girl and the bereft man form a de facto, makeshift family, and start living together as father and daughter, united by their sense of irrevocable loss. A few years later, Jungo, who earns a living cooking for the coast guards, frequently leaves a fast-transforming teenage Hana alone for long stretches of time. And so starts a fire between Jungo and Hana, whose connective tissue goes from emotional to erotic, from inchoate to inflamed, from serene to obscene. Lead by three generations of Japan's greatest actors, Tadanobu Asano (Last Life in the Universe, Café Lumière, Mongol), Fumi Nikaido (Why Don’t You Play in Hell?), and veteran actor Tatsuya Fuji (In the Realm of the Senses), My Man is a love story that goes where few dare to travel. Presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema.