San Sebastian Film Festival competition title “In My Father’s Room” has been added to Bitters End‘s fall sales slate.
The film marks the feature directorial debut of best-selling novelist Maha Harada.
Known in Japan under the title “Muyou no Hito,” the drama is adapted from Harada’s own short story “An Unnecessary Man.” The cast includes Aoi Yu (“Wife of a Spy”), Ogata Issey (“Onoda,” “Silence,” “Yi Yi”), Nagayama Eita (“Monster”) and Watanabe Eri (“Shall We Dance?”). Kitagawa Yoshio, whose credits include “Evil Doesn’t Exist” and “Lost Land,” serves as cinematographer.
The story follows Satomi, an employee at an art museum, after an envelope arrives bearing an unfamiliar key. It unlocks a room left behind by her father, dead a month earlier and alone at the time. Tracing what he did in his last days, Satomi uncovers a figure society had largely written off, one who nonetheless took quiet comfort in language, in tea ceremony and in small, overlooked beauty, and she comes to recognize the grace in how he lived.
The project marks a screen debut for Harada, one of Japan’s most widely read authors, with more than 10 million copies of her books sold since she began publishing in 2006. Harada trained in Japanese literature and art history, then spent time at a trading firm and at museums, among them New York’s Museum of Modern Art, before shifting into freelance curatorial and cultural writing work. Her art-themed novels include “Canvas of Paradise” and “Guernica Cover-Up.”
Bitters End will handle both the film’s international sales and its local release, which is scheduled for January 2027 in Japan.
The distributor has spent more than 30 years bringing international auteur cinema to Japanese audiences, including work by Hamaguchi Ryusuke, Bong Joon Ho, the Dardenne brothers, Jia Zhangke, Roy Anderson and Gianfranco Rosi. Recent releases handled by the company include “Below the Clouds,” “Young Mothers,” “Sex/Love/Dreams,” “Anora” and “The Odyssey.” On the production front, its credits as a producer include the Oscar-winning “Drive My Car,” “Two Seasons, Two Strangers,” which took the Golden Leopard at Locarno, Cannes prizewinner “All of a Sudden” and “All the Lovers in the Night,” an Un Certain Regard selection at Cannes.
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