みんな自分の人生をどう生きたらいいかなんて。本当は誰もよくわかってないんだよ。
“Nobody really knows how to live their lives.”

Kana (Mayumi Yoshida), a struggling artist, returns to Japan for her grandmother’s funeral, where the discovery of a family secret and a reconnection with an old love force her to confront her own choices regarding love and career.

With Akashi (あかし), Mayumi Yoshida offers a profound film about grief by linking it to the themes of identity and the pursuit of dreams. It’s a film that shows how the choices one makes to pursue a dream are inevitably tied to letting go of others.

Gentle and Sad

A cinematic adaptation of the eponymous autofictional short film by screenwriter, director, and actress Mayumi Yoshida, Akashi questions what it truly means to make choices. In everyone’s life, we make decisions that will influence the rest of our journey.

For Kana, the decision to leave Japan to study art led to the loss of love.

With cinematography largely in a black and white that evokes the gravity of Kana’s grief, interspersed with color scenes that tell another story of difficult choices, Akashi is a gentle and sad reflection on life.

The themes of identity, class struggle, and artistic aspiration merge as the film oscillates between past and present to explore contrasting stories of ill-fated love.

A little more…

While many films deal with estrangement, grief, and the difficulties of succeeding in life, few do so with such sincerity, showing how every choice we make has the potential to bring either happiness or sorrow. Ultimately, you must above all embrace your choices if you want to succeed in this quest for happiness.

In addition to the pervasive drama, Akashi holds a secret that will keep the viewer in a state of blur, forcing them to question what they would be willing to do to move forward in life and find happiness. Not everyone has a simple, easy life. But the choices we make will determine whether we can be happy or not. Sometimes, however, as for Kana, the past comes back to haunt us and shatters the fragile happiness we’ve sometimes worked so hard to build.

Akashi is certainly one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen this year.

Akashi is presented at VIFF on October 5th and 9th, 2025.