VIFF '25 | The Life Cycle of a Story in 'Akashi' | A Conversation with Mayumi Yoshida

Stories start small—a memory, a conversation—and somehow grow, demanding attention, demanding to be told again and again. It moves through hands, languages, and interpretations until it no longer belongs to one person at all.

For filmmaker and actor Mayumi Yoshida, the continual exchange between truth and fiction, storyteller and audience has always been the point. Her film Akashi started as a play, then a short film, and now, finally, a feature-length movie that is premiering at the Vancouver International Film Festival this week. “It’s wild to think it’s been almost a decade since the play, but I think that’s also how stories grow with you. They change because you change.”

I was lucky enough to watch an early screening of the film and sit down with Mayumi, who represents the dream of so many creatives like myself: someone with vision and tenacity who doesn't stop until their story is told. 

Set between Japan and Vancouver, Akashi follows Kana (played by Yoshida herself), a young woman navigating loss, identity, and the invisible threads that bind generations in her family. The story’s evolution mirrors Yoshida’s own; a Japanese-born, Vancouver-based artist who didn’t originally see herself as a writer but found herself compelled to tell this story.

“I didn't even have real writing experience at the time,” she tells me, “but I just had to make sure that it was done right because it's about my grandmother. Who can I trust to tell this story the right way? I just had to do it."

The story itself began in truth: a conversation between Yoshida and her grandmother about her late grandfather's first love. “What I thought was very niche and personal, is actually universal and has resonance with so many people."

Even when the story felt specific, Yoshida was guided by a singular intention: to honour her grandmother’s life and choices. "I cared so much about what my grandma experienced. Even she would tell me how much that no one would care," she laughs, “but I was like, no, it matters to me. So I’m going to do it.”

From there, the story evolved into something larger; “It's a coming of age story, a family drama, but the big story, I think, is this multigenerational love story that kind of spans across generations." Even as she speaks, I can see how much care Yoshida has about the story and its impact on her life. “We see how things get repeated and we make similar mistakes or are put in similar situations and weirdly, there’s like a loop. And I think that’s just like the nature of just family.” 

The ways that traits, dynamics, and passions can trickle down the family line is the fascinating concept that made Yoshida want investigate further with a feature-film length narrative. "Somehow these things get passed down. But it takes a different shape because it’s a different generation.” 

I was curious how Yoshida approached weaving a truth so close to her with dramatic storytelling—after all, Akashi isn’t autobiography. It’s something more fluid, built from memory and invention in equal measure. She spoke about that balance not as a creative choice, but almost as instinct. "Accuracy is important to an extent, but it's also not the most important part. The biggest part that I was impacted by was how my grandmother chose to live and how she chose to love. That was always the anchor. That's something that I think is more of as a theme rather than trying to accurately portray that.

Visually, Akashi  lives predominantly in black-and-white with a few powerful scenes in colour (including the opening). The shifts feel like a heartbeat that marks the film’s passage between memory and present. The black-and-white sequences ground us in the now, in the weight of loss and distance, while the vivid flashbacks in colour carry the warmth of what once was.

Yoshida tells me she wanted to start with colour then quickly pivot to desaturation to, “Introduce both worlds earlier on so the audience would be accustomed to the changes.” What she was really doing, though, was teaching us how to move through the film’s emotional logic, how to sit inside uncertainty. "It starts with the two lovers,” post-war optimism, in beautiful technicolour. "Then, I wanted to break that, to say, nope, now we’re in today, and it sucks. It’s not so colourful.”  That matter-of-fact tone is part of the film’s honesty: life in the present doesn’t glow like memory does. The colour belongs to what’s gone.

And maybe that’s why I keep circling back to what it must’ve felt like for Mayumi to finally let these memories go—to move from something so interior, so quietly lived in, to something available for the world to consume. I wonder if finally sharing a story that’s carried you this long feels cathartic or terrifying. “It feels so great! I think that's the whole purpose. If you don't share it, then what is the point?” For her, that surrender isn’t a loss— it’s the final stage in the story’s life cycle.

"I’m doing it so that I can share with people and so that we can all have a collective experience. If it’s in a big theatre,  at home with your cat, or on an airplane, you’re still sharing an experience that I made with me.”

That idea of connection, of the audience completing the story, seems to anchor her whole practice. “Without an audience, what are we doing?” she says. 

And it's so true. That is the whole point, isn’t it? That’s why we write, post, make art, or share anything at all: to find the people who might see something of themselves in it. Art doesn’t really exist until it meets someone else’s eyes. It’s what we chase every time we put something out there: that small moment of recognition, the proof that it landed somewhere. That’s the heart of what we do at Peliplat, too: turning private reactions into shared experience.

Before we wrap, I ask her one final question (which, honestly, was me just asking her for advice). I wanted to know how she maintains the momentum to create after finishing such a long project. With that she offers a kind of quiet creative survival tip: “Always have another project,” she says, almost like a mantra. “You don't want to lay all your eggs in one basket. I realized at one point I was putting so much of myself into Kana, but she doesn’t need to shoulder all my life. She’s going to carry this part I lived, and another character, in another story, will carry what I’m currently living. It’s all me writing it, but splitting that weight was such a lifted feeling.”

Hearing Mayumi talk about Akashi, I realized that stories don’t end when they’re finished, they're passed down to whoever finds them. A memory becomes a story, a story becomes a film, a film becomes an experience, and that experience becomes someone else’s memory. It’s the quiet cycle of creation and connection.

Akashi あかし is screening at VIFF on Thursday Oct 9 at Granville Island Stage