You Are the Film

WHEN FILM BECOMES REALITY - A META-COMEDY FROM THE WRITER OF BEYOND THE INFINITE TWO MINUTES AND RIVER

In Tokyo’s hip Shimokitazawa neighbourhood, playwright Madoka and musician Kazuma separately enter the small independent cinema Tollywood. On screen, they see not the film they expected, but each other. Through the cinema screen, they can talk to one another and intervene, trying to save the day as things start to go wrong in each other’s worlds. What begins as an impossible paradox grows into a cascade of humour, genre-blending and unexpected twists.

Makoto Ueda, the man behind the scripts for the cult low-budget sci-fi comedies Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River, takes the director’s chair himself this time. The result is a playful, heartwarming and brilliant multiverse comedy that both celebrates the cinema as a meeting place and asks what happens when two lives – and two films – begin to bleed into one another. Shot on location in Shimokitazawa on a minimal budget, the film won both The White Raven award and the audience award at its world premiere at BIFFF 2026 in Brussels.

You Are the Film is an affectionate and inventive piece of meta-play, made with Japanese precision.

Genre: Comedy, Sci-Fi

Director: Makoto Ueda

Country: Japan

Year: 2026

Cast: Marika Ito, Kai Inowaki, Riko Fujitani

Running time: 68 min

Language: Japanese dialogue, Swedish subtitles