Mariko Tetsuya’s cross-cultural drama “Expensive Stranger” has unveiled its worldwide trailer.
Following its Sept. 12 theatrical launch in Japan, the movie made its worldwide premiere on the Busan Worldwide Movie Competition and can function the closing movie at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Movie Competition.
Starring Nishijima Hidetoshi (Oscar-winning “Drive My Automotive”) and Gwei Lun-Mei (“Black Coal, Skinny Ice”), “Expensive Stranger” follows an Asian couple in New York whose marriage unravels when their younger son goes lacking. The movie explores themes of id, isolation and communication throughout cultures via what Mariko describes as “chilly violence” – the silent cruelty inside intimate relationships.
Mariko, who gained Locarno’s greatest rising director Award for “Destruction Infants” (2016), developed the challenge throughout his 2019 residency at Harvard College’s Reischauer Institute. The expertise of residing as an outsider in America knowledgeable the movie’s examination of cultural displacement and linguistic limitations.
Shot solely on location in New York in late 2024, the manufacturing featured a world crew together with cinematographer Sasaki Yasuyuki, editor Matthieu Laclau, and composer Jim O’Rourke. Puppetry director Blair Thomas created sequences that mirror the spouse’s creative background and immigrant expertise.
With 90% of dialogue in English, the manufacturing required intensive desk readings to assist the multilingual solid internalize their roles.
Roji Movies and Toei current the characteristic, with world gross sales dealt with by EST N8 and Toei. Distribution is ready via Toei in Japan, The Jokers Movies in France, and Applause Leisure in Taiwan.
Watch the worldwide trailer right here:
