My Sunshine

Takuya is a shy, introspective boy, too mesmerised by the first snowflakes of the season to be of any proper assistance to his baseball team. In winter, the children’s routine switches to practising ice hockey, but Takuya’s attention lies with the girls on the other side of the rink, who practice figure skating, instead of hitting a puck. Coach Arakawa encourages the boy’s interest and soon begins to train him for an upcoming competition in a double act with prodigy Sakura.

There is a unique softness present throughout My Sunshine: to its characters, to the film’s gentle pacing and its diffused look. The cinematography finds the slightest hues of pink in the sky, or catches different shades of white in the snow-covered scenery, evoking a dreamy and wistful mood. It latches on to the environment of the characters, and how drastically it changes between the winter and spring months. Paired with the melancholic score – Debussy’s Clair de Lune at the forefront – the individual elements come together to form a profoundly sentimental piece of impressionist filmmaking.

Only in the final third of the movie, the beginnings of a conflict start to arise and threaten the peaceful world the storyline has worked towards building.

My Sunshine is the second feature of 28-year-old Hiroshi Okuyama – who not only wrote and directed the piece, but took to camera and edit himself as well – yet his visual language is fully formed and speaks of great confidence. Comparison to his Japanese colleague Hirokazu Kore-eda’s body of work seem inevitable, due to the prevalent humanism of both styles, the intimacy in these stories and the fact that much of the cast is made up of non-professional actors.

Not only fans of Japanese cinema will delight at the discovery of this new voice, but My Sunshine will speak to a number of people due to the feature’s delicate sincerity.

Selina Sondermann

My Sunshine does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.