Why Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, a film about a father’s death, refuses to make viewers cry

SINGAPORE – The coming-of-age drama Renoir may deal with a parent’s death from cancer, but the tone of the film is rarely sad.

Children process grief in their own way and their behaviour can be perceived as being cold or unfeeling, says Japanese film-maker Chie Hayakawa.

As a child, her own father’s decline from cancer was something that would get lost in the rush of daily life and her own preoccupations as a pre-teen.

“I had to live with a cancer-stricken father for a long time. I had a sense of guilt about the fact he was going to die, but I didn’t see it as a sad thing. I just looked for fun things to do,” she tells The Straits Times through an interpreter at the Japan Creative Centre on Oct 4.

The 48-year-old writer-director was in town to present Renoir, which opened the Japanese Film Festival Singapore 2025, and to conduct a masterclass. The film received its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it was in the running for the Palme d’Or top prize.

Opening exclusively at GV Funan on Oct 9, Renoir is seen from the point of view of 11-year-old girl Fuki Okita (Yui Suzuki). As her father Keiji (veteran comedian-actor Lily Franky) battles his illness with the help of her mother Utako (Hikari Ishida), Fuki, an only child, is left mostly alone.

The introspective girl fills her days with quirky hobbies that bring her into contact with adults, not all of whom have wholesome intentions. She develops a fascination with the afterlife and psychic phenomena.

Renoir is Hayakawa’s second feature. Her first, Plan 75 (2022), a dystopian drama set in a future Japan where euthanasia is encouraged for those aged over 75, was selected as the nation’s entry to the 2023 Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.

As she became older, Hayakawa wondered why she did not let the grief over her father’s death overcome her, the way it did the adults around her.

But later, after she became a mother, she came to understand that children find it difficult to understand the enormity of death. She has a daughter, 20, and a son, 22.

Renoir is Hayakawa’s way of coming to terms with her father’s plight and her obligations as a daughter.

“I didn’t give my father enough sympathy, and the sense of guilt remained inside me, into my 20s. I wondered if humans could actually perceive or understand the pain of others fully. After making this film, I finally feel that I can forgive myself by looking back at what happened in the past,” she says.

Renoir would have turned out differently if she had made it as a young adult, when she was still racked by guilt. She would not have understood that adults prefer that children be insulated from harsh truths.

“The film would be depressing compared with what you see now. Now that I’ve become a mother, I can understand the feeling of being a parent. I can be gentler with the adults in the story,” she says.

In inhabiting the world of an 11-year-old girl in 1980s Japan – the time of the country’s economic boom – she felt it necessary to show how vulnerable children were to predatory adults at the time, a hazard that still exists today.

“Females, even when they are young, deep down, can sense they are the target of some sexual fantasy,” she says. “I wanted to describe their anxiety or vague concern about this danger.”

Japanese child actress Yui, who is 12 in 2025, has drawn praise for her performance. Hayakawa says she was prepared to audition hundreds of children for the role of Fuki, but that never happened. Yui was the first to walk in and was cast on the spot.

She possesses a natural talent for acting, as well as a strong sense of self, which appealed to Hayakawa.

“She is strong-willed. At the audition, I asked her what her strength was. She said, ‘I can imitate animal sounds.’ So, I asked her to imitate a cat, but she didn’t comply with what I just said. She said, ‘No, my recommendation is a horse.’ I liked that.”