A 22-year-old prodigy when he won the New Directors Award at San Sebastian in 2018 for his student film “Jesus,” Okuyama Hiroshi took something of a roundabout route to his second feature, “My Sunshine,” which screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard lineup.
Okuyama’s coming-of-age drama about two tween ice skaters — a boy and girl who study under the same coach in a northern provincial town — originated from his own seven years in the sport. “I learned skating from the age of 5 to 12 — I wanted to become a professional,” says Okuyama.
But he also struggled to construct a story from his childhood skating memories until he came across a 2014 hit by the singer-songwriter duo Humbert Humbert. Called “Boku no Ohisama” (“My Sunshine”), it not only supplied the title of his film, but its lyrics about “getting stuck when I try say something important” also gave him the idea for his protagonist, Takuya (Koshiyama Keitatsu).
A dreamy kid who speaks with a stutter, Takuya becomes entranced with Sakura (Nakanishi Kiara), a quietly confident girl who glides and leaps around the town’s ice rink like a vision of beauty and grace. Bad at hockey and baseball — two must-do sports for local boys — Takuya tries to clumsily figure skate on his own. Sakura’s coach, the firm-but-understanding Arakawa (Ikematsu Sosuke), is touched by Takuya’s ambition and desire and starts to train him in his spare time.
“I thought that if I could use (“Boku no Ohisama”) as a theme song, I could make it into a movie,” Okuyama says. He wrote a letter to the musical duo, who, after rejecting other offers to use the song in films, give him their enthusiastic OK.
The final piece of the puzzle was Ikematsu, an in-demand actor who had appeared in everything from the hit “Death Note” horror series to Kore-eda Hirokazu’s award-winning 2018 family drama “Shoplifters.”
After turning down Ikematsu when he proposed working together on a manga-based film project, Okuyama asked him to appear in a documentary he was making for the Hermes brand. “I was able to experience his true coolness and charm, and it made me want to make a film with him again,” Okuyama says.
He wrote a part for Ikematsu to play a former pro skater turned coach who lives contentedly with his partner (Wakaba Ryuya), a gas station owner, and sees potential in Sakura and Takuya as an ice dance pair. Okuyama then successfully pitched the project at the 2022 Asian Film Market in Busan and shot it with the backing of distributor Tokyo Theaters, newspaper publisher Asahi Shimbun and France’s Comme des Cinémas.
The film will be released in Japan by Tokyo Theaters and in France by Art House Films. Charades is handling international sales.
Both Koshiyama and Nakanishi had had experience as skaters when Okuyama cast them as Takuya and Sakura, but not Ikematsu, who trained intensively for the part. “He practiced once a week for six months, more than an hour each time, before the shooting,” says Okuyama. “I was really amazed at not only at his progress, but also at the fact that such a famous actor could devote so much time to creating a role.”
Okuyama donned skates himself to film the skating scenes at a rink in snowy Iwate Prefecture. “The sun doesn’t shine [on the landscape] that much because there are mountains nearby,” he says. “So I set up lights on all the windows.” The resulting gauzy light beams flow around Sakura as she skates, while Okuyama’s camera glides and swirls in synch with her movements.
“My Sunshine,” however, is more than a gorgeously shot ode to the sport or celebration of youth: It also examines the difficulties and dangers of being a sexual minority in conservative Japan.
But the film refrains from black-and-white judgments about its characters. “I think it’s important to show a good person doing or saying something bad,” Okuyama says. “Even a good person can have a bad heart at times.”