Competition With a Quietly Devastating Portrait of Loss

The Japanese auteur opens the Competition programme with a 110-minute chamber piece starring Takako Matsu — his most precise and emotionally controlled work to date. Mk2 Films handles international sales.

Ten years after Harmonium won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and established him as one of Japanese cinema’s most distinctive voices, Koji Fukada has finally arrived where his talent always pointed: the Palme d’Or Competition. Nagi Notes, which opens the Competition screenings at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, is not the film that announces its own importance. It is something more difficult to pull off — a film that earns it in silence.

The setup is deliberately understated. Yoriko (Takako Matsu) is an artist living in rural Nagi, nursing the wounds of a failed love affair she cannot bear to mourn. Her friend and former sister-in-law Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), a recently separated architect, travels from Tokyo to visit. Two women. A quiet village. A shared language of things unsaid. What unfolds across 110 minutes is Fukada at his most architecturally precise: a film built from restraint, in which the emotional weight accumulates the way light shifts — slowly, irresistibly, until the room has completely changed.

A Film Born From a Building

Fukada has said that “the initial spark” for Nagi Notes was the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art (Nagi MOCA) in Japan’s southern Okayama Prefecture, known for its rural landscapes and lifestyles — specifically the idea of filming a story where diverse people intersect within the architecture designed by Arata Isozaki, a structure that stands out in the peaceful landscape. It is a revealing origin story. Fukada has always been a filmmaker interested in what spaces do to people — how the walls we inhabit shape the silences we keep. Here, the Nagi MOCA becomes a kind of emotional pressure chamber, a place where art and grief share the same air.

The film was written and directed by Fukada and stars, alongside Matsu and Ishibashi, Waku Kawaguchi, Kiyora Fujiwara, Sawako Fujima and Kenichi Matsuyama. The ensemble is precisely calibrated: Matsu, one of Japan’s most accomplished screen presences, gives Yoriko a stillness that reads as both composure and containment. Ishibashi, as the architect whose professional language of structure and form quietly mirrors the film’s own formal rigour, is her perfect foil.

The Infrastructure Behind the Film

Nagi Notes is a Japan-France-Singapore-Philippines co-production, produced by Hassaku Labs and Survivance, with Star Sands, Momo Film Co. and Wonderstruck. Cinematography is by Hidetoshi Shinomiya, with editing by Sylvie Lager and score by composer Lee Pei-Chin. The international reach of the co-production reflects both the ambition of the project and the increasingly global infrastructure that independent Japanese auteur cinema requires to travel.

Mk2 Films handles international sales — the company’s fifth collaboration with Fukada, following Love on Trial, which premiered at Cannes last year, and Love Life, which competed at Venice in 2022. Mk2 has framed the film as “an exploration of intimate human relationships, combining emotional subtlety with a sharp eye on contemporary Japanese society.” That framing is accurate, if insufficient — it describes the surface without quite touching the wound.

A Career Trajectory That Demanded This Stage

Fukada was first in the Cannes Official Selection in 2016 with Harmonium, which played in Un Certain Regard and won the strand’s Jury Prize. His 2020 film The Real Thing was a recipient of the festival’s Covid-19 label after that edition was cancelled due to the pandemic, while he returned physically to the festival in 2025 with Love on Trial, which played in Cannes Première. The Competition slot, then, arrives as a form of institutional recognition that has been quietly building for a decade.

He is not alone in representing Japan at the top of this year’s programme. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box also compete for the Palme d’Or — a remarkable moment for Japanese cinema, arriving in the same year that Japan has been named the 2026 Marché du Film Country of Honour, the first East Asian nation to hold the title since the initiative launched in 2022.

In that context, Nagi Notes carries weight beyond its own quiet story. But Fukada, characteristically, would almost certainly prefer that weight remain invisible — carried, like everything in this film, beneath the surface.

Nagi Notes opens Competition screenings at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, running May 12–23, 2026. International sales: Mk2 Films.