Accompanied by his friend Miyata, Sano returns to Izu, a seaside resort in Japan where five years before he fell in love with his wife Nagi.

This is the synopsis of Super Happy Forever [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Kohei Igarashi
scheda film], the new feature by Japanese director Kohei Igarashi, which is having its world premiere in the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival, taking place from 28 August to 7 September.

The director explains, "In 2018, I received an email from Hiroki Sano and Yoshinori Miyata saying, "We'd like to make a film where we play our own characters." I didn't know them at the time, but I was immediately interested. We met for the first time in 2019. I first asked them to write a plot and submit it to me, and then we started talking based on that material. The content of these exchanges is what forms the foundations of Super Happy Forever. Then Covid came along and for a while it was impossible to envisage anything. We keep working together. I would ask Sano and Miyata, for example, to tell me about their day-to-day lives and their recent experiences. Something else happened to me: in 2021, I lost a friend from high school. He was in his thirties, loved surfing and was in good health, but one morning he died suddenly. I was deeply shocked. I found it hard to accept, or maybe I didn't really know what or how to think about his death. That's the feeling I tried to express in the film."

Igarashi studied in Tokyo’s Zokei University, under Nobuhiro Suwa. In 2008, his first feature film, Voice of Rain That Comes at Night, was screened at the Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival and won the Korean Critics Award. In 2014, his Tokyo University of the Arts thesis film Hold Your Breath Like a Lover was selected for the 67th Locarno Film Festival. In 2017, he co-directed The Night I Swam [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Damien Manivel, Kohei Igar…
scheda film] with French filmmaker Damien Manivel, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section.

The film stars Hiroki Sano, Yoshinori Miyata, Nairu Yamamoto and Hoang Nhu Quynh, and is a production by Makoto Oki and Yusaku Emoto for Nobo (Japan) and co-produced by Martin Bertier and Damien Manivel for MLD Films (France). International sales will be handled by French company Bac Films.

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