RENOIR

RENOIR, the second feature from acclaimed Japanese director Chie Hayakawa, is a tender, dreamlike meditation on childhood and grief. Following her award-winning debut PLAN 75—which won the Grand Prize at the 2023 Hawai‘i International Film Festival—Hayakawa returns with a deeply personal and impressionistic story set in Tokyo, Summer 1987. Eleven-year-old Fuki (Yui Suzuki) retreats into her vivid inner world as her father, Keiji (Lily Franky), battles terminal cancer and her mother, Utako (Hikari Ichida), juggles caregiving with the demands of daily life. To cope with the looming presence of death and emotional isolation, Fuki becomes fascinated by telepathy, using imagination as a shield and a means of connection. Told with lyrical restraint and haunting visual poetry, RENOIR is an elegy for lost innocence—a delicate portrait of a child grappling with the mysteries of life and mortality. Hayakawa masterfully captures the fragile boundary between reality and reverie in this moving exploration of familial love and impermanence.