Between Us brings a broken childhood friendship to Tokyo
Playing in Tokyo’s Nippon Cinema Now programme, Matsumura Shingo’s Between Us follows two childhood friends who meet again in a high school drama club six years after a family camping incident. The director describes how still camerawork, distance and a play within the film help the characters approach feelings they struggle to express directly.
Arts··Morning
A reunion at the Tokyo festival
Japanese filmmaker Matsumura Shingo’s Between Us is screening at the Tokyo International Film Festival in Japan, in Nippon Cinema Now, its programme devoted to Japanese films. The story follows Makoto and Kasumi, childhood friends separated after an incident during a camping trip shared by their families. Six years later they find themselves in the same high school drama club. Kawashima Ririka and Kurasawa Anna play the two young women. Kasumi’s commitment to theatre has become so intense that some other club members have left.[1], [2]
Distance becomes part of the film’s language
Matsumura describes a deliberate rule against handheld camerawork. He wants to distinguish his big-screen images from videos made with compact cameras for social media, while allowing actors’ emotions to emerge slowly. The characters often occupy separate parts of the frame. Their eyes and the space between them convey that each remains aware of the other, even when they are physically apart. The director says he gave his leads little specific instruction because their attentiveness to other people already suited the roles.[1]
A play supplies words for the friendship
A script Kasumi discovers supplies the film’s title and becomes part of the friends’ reconnection. Their separate readings are edited as if they were exchanging lines. Matsumura says the fictional dialogue lets them express feelings they cannot voice in ordinary life. He traces the film’s beginnings to questions about human connection after disasters, the pandemic and wars, while stressing that these events are not literal subjects of the story. The relationship between the girls remains the centre of the film.[1]
