The debut film "Double Life" by Yo En‘en, a Chinese female director studying in Japan and considered a successor to Hirokazu Koreeda and contemporary of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, will premiere for the first time at Uplink Kichijoji on April 19 (Friday)!

2024.03.13 18:00

Enenfilms

"Double Life", the feature film debut of Chinese director Yo En‘en, winner of the SKIP CITY INTERNATIONAL D-Cinema FESTIVAL 2022 Domestic Competition Feature Film Grand Prix and the Bari International Film Festival Best Director Award, will premiere on April 19, 2024 (Friday) at UPLINK Kichijoji. The film will have a key visual and a trailer has been released.

The film's key visual and trailer have been released. In addition, comments from director Yo En‘en and cast members have been received. Some interesting comments from the Tallinn Black Night Film Festival will also be introduced.

◆Official website:

https://doublelife-enenfilms.com/

Poster

"Double Life" is a story of emotional liberation and revival, depicting a woman who, while leading a double life with her rented husband, becomes aware of her own new feelings through a physical and psychological approach of touching another person's body and feeling the other person's heart.

The film is directed by Yo En‘en, who graduated from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy in China before going to Japan to study at Rikkyo University's graduate school. Inspired by Werner Herzog's "Family Romance Company," a 2019 film about the "human rental business," Yo, as a Chinese herself, has written a screenplay about Japan as seen from the outside. The main character Shiori, who is dissatisfied with her married life, is played by Atsuko Kikuchi of "Zawameki" (directed by Daisuke Miyazaki).

The film had its world premiere at the SKIP CITY INTERNATIONAL D-Cinema FESTIVAL 2022. In addition to winning the Best Feature Film Award in the domestic competition section, the film was screened at the 35th Tokyo International Film Festival and officially selected for the Tallinn Black Night Film Festival 2022. The film also won the Best Director Award at the Bari International Film Festival held in Italy last year. Highly acclaimed at numerous film festivals in Japan and abroad for its skillfully cut and delicate physical expression, two years later, it's finally decided to be publicly released in theaters.

Director's Photo

◆Message from the Director:

"Double Life" is not only my graduation project from the graduate school of Rikkyo University, but also my "longed-for feature debut". In terms of its narrative foundation and themes, "Double Life" is strongly influenced by Werner Herzog's "Family Romance, Inc. I felt a sense of eeriness, emptiness, and disconnection from reality in this film, and felt a strange sympathy for it.

My exploration of the themes of "rented people," "double life," and "contact" is based on my own latent desire to expose more of myself. In both Beijing and Tokyo, days pass by unnecessarily with a gaping hole in my heart, and I always feel a gap between people. It is not only the main character, Shiori, who wants to be loved and to have the hole in her heart filled, but also myself, and maybe even you.

I am deeply moved to be able to release this film in theaters over the past two years. This film is the starting point of my filmmaking and continues to energize me.

Both the characters in the film and I, who have "holes that cannot be filled," connect with each other and fulfill each other. I sincerely hope that "Double Life" will bring us into contact with each other.

＜Yo En‘en＞

Director/Screenwriter/Editor

Yo En‘en graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 2015. She studied Japanese on her own while working and came to Japan in 2018. After completing a one-year Japanese language program at Waseda University, she attended Tokyo Visual Arts Film Department (now Department of Film and New Media) in 2019 and entered Rikkyo University Graduate School in 2020. She studied directing under Professor Kunitoshi Manda. As her graduate school graduation project, she produced her first feature film "Double Life," which had its world premiere at SKIP CITY INTERNATIONAL D-Cinema FESTIVAL 2022 and won the Best Feature Film Award in the domestic competition category. The film was also screened at the 35th Tokyo International Film Festival, was an official selection of the Tallinn Black Night Film Festival 2022, and won the Best Director Award at the Bari International Film Festival held in Italy last year. She is currently working as a film publicist while continuing to make independent films.

◆Comments from Atsuko Kikuchi (playing Shiori Koyanagi):

Everyone lives with multiple layers.

The self that talks to you, me when I meet others, the other side of your smile.

This role taught me about the things that support us when we have to live our lives with these layers.

＜Atsuko Kikuchi＞

Actor

While a student at Tama Art University, Atsuko Kikuchi worked as an assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, an assistant to silent film pianist Mie Yanagishita, and as a performer in the African x post-rock instrumental band panorama. After graduation, she studied under directors Kunitoshi Manda, Koji Fukada, and Sho Miyake at the Actors Course of the Film School of Tokyo. She has starred in many films directed by domestic and international filmmakers including Kei Nanazato and Daisuke Miyazaki. She has also worked in a wide range of fields, including contemporary theater, music videos with musicians, and photo modeling.

◆Comments from Edvinas Puksta (from Tallinn Black Night Film Festival):

In his subtle, frank, and bold debut feature, Chinese director Yu Yuan Yuan delicately explores the strange and unusual Japanese practice of renting a surrogate for an important event in someone's life. While master filmmaker Werner Herzog exposed the peculiar customs and awkward services of the Japanese in his 2019 film "Family Romance Inc.", Yu, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, is braver, diving deeper into the dangerous challenges of fake relationships. Talented and confident, the auteur surprises us with a cruel and heartbreaking twist on a seemingly romantic minimalist drama.

What is the Tallinn Black Night Film Festival?

The Tallinn Black Night Film Festival is an international film festival held since 1997 in Tallinn, the capital and largest city of Estonia. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia located in Northern Europe, is a bay city facing the Baltic Sea and is known as the place where Skype was developed. It is the only Nordic film festival accredited by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF), which primarily screens films with a strong auteuristic and message content.

◆Story:

Wandering between two husbands, a butterfly comes back to life when she leaves the darkness...

When her husband cancels the workshop they were supposed to go to together, Shiori (Kikuchi Atsuko) asks Junnosuke (Matsuoka Shingo), an agent introduced to her by a colleague, to play the role of her husband. Satisfied with Junnosuke, Shiori rents an apartment without her husband's knowledge and begins a pseudo-marital life with him. As Shiori leads a double life, going back and forth between her husband and her rental husband, she gradually becomes aware of her former dreams and the new feelings that lie deep within her.

【Cast】

Atsuko Kikuchi

Shingo Matsuoka

Hiromi Furukawa

Hiromi Wakasa

Mai Asada

Sayaka Kawaguchi

【Staff】

Director/Screenwriter/Editor: Yo En‘en

Cinematography: Takumi Kohama

Lighting: Shintaro Murasawa

Sound Recording: Sota Nishida