"The Blue Breaks" Takes a Japan-Italy Film Project to Tokyo's Financing Market
A Japan-Italy film project called The Blue Breaks has been presented at the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market, Variety reported. The market ran from October 28 to 30 as part of TIFFCOM, the content market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival.
The Gap-Financing Market is a project market. Producers bring unfinished films to meet potential backers in one-on-one meetings, hoping to fill the money still missing from a budget. The 2026 edition selected 24 projects, and it teamed up with Canada's Frontières platform on five of them, Deadline reported when the lineup was announced in September.
The Blue Breaks is an adaptation of Ryohei Machiya's 2016 novel. It will be directed by Takuya Uchiyama, the Japanese filmmaker behind Numb. Japanese producer Naomi Satoh of Differentia is behind the project. Parsifal Reparato of the Italian company Antropica is co-producer.
The team is still building the film. They are working on the screenplay, casting and financing. A shoot is planned for 2027, with completion set for 2028. The makers are aiming for a premiere at an international festival, though no festival has been named.
The film is a co-production, which means companies from two countries make it together and share the cost and the credit. Japan and Italy have a formal agreement covering this kind of joint work, and it came into effect on August 9, 2024.
Nothing about the film can be seen on a screen yet. A project at this stage is still years from a cinema, and many pitched films never get that far. Each one needs a screenplay, a cast, a crew, a budget and a buyer before it can open anywhere. The Blue Breaks now has its next set of meetings ahead, and the people in those rooms will decide which of those steps come next.
