Yuki (Noë Sampy) is a nine-year-old growing up in Paris with her French father (Hippolyte Giradot) and Japanese mother (Tsuyu Shimizu). When Yuki’s parents decide to separate, she learns she will be moving to Japan with her mother and leaving behind everything she knows, including best friend Nina (Arielle Moutel). The two girls soon begin to plot ways to get Yuki’s parents back together, but the adults prove resistant to these attempts. Ultimately, the girls decide to run away into the forest and the realm of their imaginations. In this enchantingly understated collaboration between two acclaimed cinematic talents, Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa (A Perfect Couple; Paris, je t’aime) and French actor Hippolyte Giradot, we follow the film’s young subjects out of the adult world and assume, in a deceptively straightforward way, the perspective of a child dealing with the experience of cultural difference, separation and uprooting.

View full French Cinema Now schedule


Written by Hippolyte Girardot, Nobuhiro Suwa. Photographed by Josée Deshaies. With Hippolyte Girardot, Noë Sampy, Tsuyu Shimizu, Arielle Moutel. (92 min. In French and Japanese with English subtitles, Films Distribution)