Ryuko, in the Unfaithful Evening Q&A Session

Director Ryuji Ujita, actor Shunsuke Sawada and music coordinator Akira Matsumoto were on hand for the Q&A session for Ryuko, in the Unfaithful Evening, the first of the three Japanese works screening in competition. In answer to the first question, why the film was supposedly shot in Osaka but the actors all spoke standard Japanese, not the regional dialect, they answered that they wanted to show that this story could have taken place anywhere in Japan. In the next question, a young woman spoke as an aspiring filmmaker of the same generation, and asked for any advice that the director could give from his experiences during production. His answer? Not to try to do too much, a lesson painfully learned during his first work. If you forward your depictions of people of the same generation, you don't have to struggle to depict adults, and you can save on salaries to professional actors. He also advised other young filmmakers to keep their shoots short rather than let them drag on unnecessarily. These words were followed by a momentary questionless silence from the audience. Was everyone so moved by the work that they couldn't speak? Did everyone feel like a conspirator? After that, in response to a question from the moderator, we learned from Sawada and Matsumoto that the director had emphasized the staff and cast's freedom to do as they liked on set. Both explained that this work, one in many co-productions for them, was as smooth as breathing in and out. Ujita's next film is scheduled to start next summer. Laughing at himself, he said he'd tried to include various genres, but that he wasn't entirely able to escape from family drama in the new film either.