Brand New Landscape
New Directors/New Films 2026
April 8 - 19
An absentee father returns to Tokyo—and his estranged children’s lives—to take on a major urban-renewal project in Yuiga Danzuka’s hushed and affecting family drama, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
Adult siblings Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) and Emi (Mai Kiryu) have recovered, more or less, from the family tragedy that marked their childhood: Ren now drifts through life as a flower deliveryman, and Emi is engaged, though she privately doubts her suitability for long-term commitment. Their fragile equilibrium is shaken when they reunite with their father, Hajimi (Kenichi Endo), a starchitect who has taken control of a controversial new urban-redevelopment project in Shibuya that will displace the neighborhood’s unhoused population. As in their childhood, when he left the family after their mother’s sudden death, Hajimi is willing to take a bulldozer to the past to make room for the future. In his debut feature, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, writer-director Yuiga Danzuka (son of renowned earthscape designer Eiki Danzuka, whose Miyashita Park stands in for Hajimi’s project in the film) casts a calm gaze over Tokyo’s “brand-new landscape” of modern architecture—and over the architecture of modernity and its discontents. Opening with a shot of a fast-food family meal, the film picks up where Edward Yang left off in Yi Yi, taking a domestic drama and seeding it with an ambitious commentary on how the structure of capitalism shapes and distorts our most intimate relationships. A CineCina release.
