NOMINATED FOR BEST FILM AT TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS,
THE FILM MAKES ITS EXCLUSIVE NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE ON FILM MOVEMENT PLUS ON FEBRUARY 24, 2023
“Filled with conversations of nostalgia and mortality, Yanagawa
has a heart-tugging premise…[and] and nails all its emotional beats”
— Matthaeus Choo, Sinema.com
Winner of top awards at Cannes, Berlin, Locarno and many other top festivals around the globe, celebrated director Zhang Lu’s latest film, YANAGAWA, is his first Chinese-made picture after a decade making films in Korea. Continuing his exploration of cultural, political and emotional spaces, Lu’s latest drama involves two brothers with very different personalities. Both live in Beijing, but they’ve remained estranged from each other. The narrative takes a turn, however, when the younger brother proposes they travel together to Yanagawa, Japan, to seek out the woman that they both loved in their youth.
Nominated for the Best Film Grand Prize at the 2021 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, YANAGAWA is star-studded, featuring two of Asia’s top actors: Ni Ni, best known for her collaboration with Zhang Yimou in The War Flowers and Japanese actor Sosuke Ikematsu, who starred in Killing and Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Shoplifters, and it again allows the director to tackle the issues of East Asian identity and the impact of history, this time through the prism of a love story that blurs memory with the present.
