Phone Series to Festival Screen: Ueda Shinichiro's Earthlings in Love

Earthlings in Love, directed by Ueda Shinichiro, is screening in the Nippon Cinema Now section of the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival. It started life as something much smaller, a run of short episodes posted to social media.

The original version was 30 episodes, each only a few minutes long. Together they ran 76 minutes. The Tokyo International Film Festival says the series gathered 60 million views as a vertical series, the tall, phone-shaped frame that Ueda chose before he wrote the screenplay. The project was never planned as a feature film.

Online reaction changed the plan. Ueda said enthusiastic responses from viewers encouraged him to turn the series into a feature for cinemas. The re-edited version, reported by Variety, runs 111 minutes.

The story follows Shinpei, a film director who learns he has young-onset dementia, a form of the illness that starts before age 65. He sets out to record his memories and to finish a film he began making with friends as a teenager. Ueda said the idea grew partly from his own experience meeting old schoolmates. Each of them remembered the same events differently.

Ueda was born in Shiga, Japan, in 1984 and started making films in junior high school. His feature debut was One Cut of the Dead (2017), which the festival says grew from two cinemas to 350 over its run. That earlier film is the reason many audiences will recognise his name.

The festival lists Ueda and actors Kato Shinsuke, Kiyose Yaeko and Suzuse Ibuki as the planned Q&A guests. Ueda and Kato have already appeared on the red carpet for the film. The Nippon Cinema Now section gives Japanese films a showcase at the festival, and this one arrives there after a path that began on a phone screen.