Two Tokyo Film-Makers Describe Hiding Pregnancies From Their Work

Two film-makers at the Tokyo International Film Festival have said they kept pregnancy and new motherhood secret from the people they worked with, for fear that job offers would dry up. Teodora Ana Mihai and Sode Yukiko described the secrecy at a Tokyo Talks session, according to Variety, published on Monday, 2 November 2026.

Mihai is a Romanian-Belgian film-maker. She was born in Bucharest under Ceausescu's regime and moved to Belgium in 1989, joining her parents, who had fled there the year before, according to the Cannes Cinéma de la Plage festival page. At the talk, she said she told few people in the film business once she was pregnant. She was still hiding the pregnancy under her clothes at six months. Her daughter was born when she was 37.

Sode said she kept the birth of her second child hidden, even from producers she trusted. She was convinced that offers would stop once people knew she had a newborn. She had described the same secret in a 2021 festival conversation with Indonesian director Kamila Andini.

The festival has put both women on its programme. Mihai's film Heysel 85 is in competition, the festival's main contest for prizes. She won the festival's special jury prize in 2021 for La Civil. Sode's All the Lovers in the Night debuted at Cannes and is screening in Tokyo's Gala Selection, a showcase of high-profile titles. It is her first theatrical feature in five years, after Aristocrats.

The session was moderated by Kondo Kanako of the festival's programming team. The festival lists it as a TOKYO TALK conversation, with both women billed as film-director guests.

For readers outside the industry, the story is about how a film career can make a personal milestone feel like a risk. Both women framed the secrecy as their own fear of losing work. Film schedules run on festivals, shoots and sales meetings, and an absence can be costly. Their accounts put that pressure in plain terms, and they did it on a public stage.