Nagi Notes

Koji Fukada is among the most quietly admired of contemporary Japanese directors, a filmmaker whose Harmonium won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2016 and whose subsequent work — A Girl Missing, Love Life — has been a fixture of the major festivals. Nagi Notes brought him into the main competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, a Japan–France–Philippines–Singapore co-production adapted from Oriza Hirata's celebrated play Tōkyō Notes.

The film follows Yuri, a Tokyo architect, who travels to the rural village of Nagi to visit Yoriko, her former sister-in-law, and to sit as the model for a sculpture. From this slight premise Fukada builds one of his characteristic chamber pieces, attending to the eddies of feeling that move between people who were once family and to the texture of provincial Japanese life. Shizuka Ishibashi and Takako Matsu lead an ensemble that works in glances and silences as much as words.

Reviewed warmly at Cannes, where it holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the film extends Fukada's patient, humane study of how households form and dissolve. Its French co-production, like much of his recent output, reflects the European art-house circuit's long investment in a director whose restraint and moral curiosity place him in a lineage running back to Ozu.