Aspects of 11-year-old Yuna’s life are called into question when her white Belgian father is involved in a serious accident, leading to the arrival of her Japanese mother, who comes to visit with her young daughter from another marriage in tow. Miwako Van Weyenberg's debut narrative feature, Soft Leaves [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Miwako Van Weyenberg
scheda film], which premiered in the Big Screen Competition at the 2025 IFFR, traces her protagonist’s journey of self-discovery and great change marked by renewed discomfort in her divorced parents’ arrangement. Cineuropa talked with the writer-director about her approach to the film’s tender family dynamics and the nature motifs that permeate her work, as signalled also by its title.

Cineuropa: The way the script is written feels very personal, but I wanted to start by asking how you relate to the film’s material.
Miwako Van Weyenberg: As I'm also half-Belgian, half-Japanese, I often get the question of whether the film is autobiographical. I always have to say that the story is not, but the emotions and the feelings of the characters and all the characters [themselves] are something that I know very well. That’s always my starting point: I start from the the emotions that the characters go through, and I start shaping the story around those emotions that I want to tell.

There have been a number of films over the last few years that have dealt with multiracial identity through similar lenses, particularly between France and Belgium, Japan and Korea. How do you see your film as engaging in these cinematic conversations?
First of all, I'm happy to contribute to the representation. One of the biggest compliments that I get now, that people send me through Instagram, for example, is when people thank me for the representation. I start tearing up. For me, this is the film that I wanted to make, but it’s also the film that I wanted to see. But at the same time, it was never my intention to make a statement concerning cultural differences or racism. It was never a statement against criticism. The multicultural aspect is a natural part of the film, but it doesn’t have to be the subject of the film. I see Soft Leaves as the story of one search for identity – on the one hand, within a family, but on the other hand, in two different cultures.

The relationship between Yuna and her older brother Kai is particularly poignant, and we learn about the family dynamics through them. How did this come about while writing?
It grew organically while I was writing. I’m an only child, so I think the brother and the half-sister are all part of a big fantasy in fiction that I’m able to write. I don’t remember making the specific choice that she will have a brother, she will have a half sister. But one thing that I still think about that is very strange to me is that during the writing process, Yuna was a boy. I’m so used to Yuna being played by Lill [Berteloot], but during the casting process, I got the question of whether the character could maybe be a girl because that would open up more possibilities and we would have more candidates for casting. I didn’t think much of it in that moment, but then I said yes, and I saw Lill and it all clicked together. I think that’s also a part of how it grew very naturally. Of course, it’s with intention, but at the same time, it's more that it grows out of something.

The “organics” of the film also come in the form of a lot of nature motifs – the title, of course, which develops new meaning over the course of the film, but also Yuna’s desire to go camping with her father, and her rescued bird, Choco.
It was definitely there from the beginning of the writing process. It grew together with the script: the nature parts, the birds, the drawings, the leaves, the trees, the camping. I couldn’t imagine it being any other way, because I think there is this feeling of nostalgia that I had from the beginning when I was writing this film. For me, nostalgia in audiovisual work is very difficult. How do you convey nostalgia? Nostalgia to me is something you can sense – you can almost smell nostalgia, but you cannot smell film. That's why the nature elements are something that, for me, are the closest to how you experience nostalgia in real life.