VIFF ´25: Akashi

Mayumi Yoshida is a name that has been on my radar for some time, not because of a lengthy filmography, but because she has become such a prominent figure in Vancouver’s independent scene. Between her performances, her short films, and her presence as a representative voice in the city’s filmmaking spaces, she’s been steadily carving out her place. So it feels fitting that her first feature, Akashi, based on her short of the same name, ends up being not only worthy, but also a reminder of the direction Canadian cinema should be aiming for, and often forgets.

The film tells the story of Kana, a woman in her forties (or close to it), who returns to her hometown in Japan after the death of her grandmother. Although the city resembles the place where she grew up, it also feels unfamiliar. In the midst of this, she reconnects with a former lover, Hiro, and begins to question her own existence.

At first, I’ll admit I had my reservations. When the Crave logo appeared on the screen, I braced myself, nothing personal, against the distributor, but most of their productions haven’t impressed me. Add to that the initial setup of a woman returning home, rekindling an old romance, and confronting family ghosts, and I feared we were heading into the kind of simplistic, Hallmark-adjacent storytelling Vancouver was notorious for until recently. Thankfully, Akashi turned out to be the complete opposite, gracefully subverting those expectations as it moved forward.

Kana’s journey is not one of loud drama or sensational events, but rather one of reconciling her identity with her family, her ancestors, and the memory of those who shaped her, but whom she never truly knew. Yoshida captures the complexity of that process: understanding who we are today, even as we change, while carrying the weight of those who came before us.

The film positions itself as a multigenerational story, and indeed, it shifts between two timelines: Kana in the present (shot in black and white) and her grandparents’ romance in the past (shot in colour). While the two threads aren’t tightly interwoven, their contrast adds depth, prompting reflections on memory and nostalgia not just as sentimental weight, but as forces that can either move us forward or keep us stuck. This is mirrored in Hiro, who feels trapped in the life he’s settled into in Japan, while Kana embodies the dissonance of someone who has left and returned. And most compellingly, the film highlights the persistence of female oppression: the inherited burden of carrying others’ expectations, keeping memories alive not for oneself but for the sake of everyone else. That pressure still lingers in Kana’s family today.

I wasn’t entirely sure at first why Yoshida chose to shoot Kana’s timeline in black and white, but in the final sequence, it clicked. It’s as if we’re finally seeing the true colours of each character. Not because Kana is deceptive, but because she herself doesn’t know who she really is until that moment. This reminds me of the long, conversational style of Hong Sang-soo, where identity is revealed gradually, or even Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina, with its quiet, black-and-white domesticity. It also resonates with stories of dislocation, such as Anthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps or Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, which feel like close siblings to Akashi.

What I’ve often criticized in Canadian cinema is its tendency to swing either into banal melodrama or into shallow “issue” films stripped of cinematic substance. Akashi doesn’t fall into either trap. Instead, it’s deeply personal, emotionally resonant, and cinematically rich, a story of love, identity, and nostalgia that reminds me of what Canadian filmmaking can and should aspire to.