Your Lovely Smile
あなたの微笑み

Your Lovely Smile is a charming and heartfelt road movie that follows an independent filmmaker as he travels from Okinawa to Hokkaido, seeking arthouse cinemas that would showcase his low-budget films amid the COVID-19 pandemic. On his journey, he meets a mysterious girl who assumes different identities in each location. His destiny shifts when he arrives at the northernmost cinema in Japan.

In this enchanting and honest film, Malaysian director Lim Kah Wai, based in Osaka, joins Watanabe Hirobumi, who plays the fictional lead of the film and is also a real-life indie filmmaker. The trip exposes the harsh reality that the indie film industry in Japan faces during the pandemic, as arthouse cinemas struggle with financial woes, and young filmmakers lose their audience and have to explore alternative ways to distribute their films. However, the film does not succumb to despair, but rather celebrates the optimism that the director(s) still hold. In the end, their passion for the seventh art motivates them to persevere despite the bleakness of the situation. The film is a heartwarming homage to all the cinephiles who still believe in the magic of cinema.

In the presence of director Lim Kah Wai.

LIM KAH WAI
Lim Kah Wai, born in Kuala Lumpur in 1973, studied electrical engineering in Osaka and film directing in Beijing. In 2010 he directed his first film After All These Years. His subsequent films such as Magic and Loss, New World, Fly Me to Minami and Love in Late Autumn have been screened and won awards at many international film festivals. He is considered a “pan-Asian” filmmaker who shoots his films in different countries with different language casts. No Where, Now Here (2018) and Somewhen Somewhere (2019) were filmed in Europe. His last film Come & Go (2020)  was shown at the first Red Lotus 2022.

In collaboration with

Red Lotus 2023

Japan 2022
103 Min | Color | Japanese with English subtitles

Directed by LIM Kah Wai

Your Lovely Smile © Cinema Drifters