Brand New Landscape

Official Selection, 2025 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight
Official Selection, 2025 San Sebastian International Film Festival

Ten years ago, Ren’s father chose a rising architecture career over his wife and kids. The moment splintered the family, leading each member to different paths. For Ren, that became chugging across Tokyo as a flower delivery man, a witness to the city’s vast physical transformations – the hulking new malls designed by people like his estranged father. These are 21st century fortresses of stacked steel, mini-cities adorned by Gucci and Louis Vuitton signs and connected by escalators and sky bridges. On one delivery in hip Daikanyama, the concrete walkways lead him to the new offices of the father he hasn’t seen in years. The city that tore them apart sees that their eyes lock again.

A riveting feature debut by the 26-year-old Yuiga Danzuka, BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE is family drama from the perspective of a generation unmoored, for whom the idea of home and structure is as much an illusion as the shopping malls made to pass as city parks. His younger characters seem unwilling or incapable of reconciling a domestic fantasy, while the father is oblivious to the fact that an architect may fabulate worlds and spaces of communion but is a stranger in the house he created. For this family, it will take uncanny coincidences and even magical intervention to shatter the glass façade. Quiet, unsettling, and deeply felt, BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE marks the arrival of an impressive, confident new voice in Japanese cinema.

– Brian Hu