‘Between Us’ Director Matsumura Shingo on Finding Connection After Disaster and Making Films on Japanese Budgets

Unspoken emotional wounds linger throughout “Between Us,” Japanese director Matsumura Shingo’s new film playing in the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Nippon Cinema Now section, its strand for Japanese films.

The film follows Makoto and Kasumi, childhood best friends who drift apart after an incident on a joint family camping trip and reunite six years later in their high school drama club. Kawashima Ririka, Kurasawa Anna, Kikuchi Akiko, Usuda Asami, Saito Yoichiro and Miura Takahiro star. The script leaves a lot unsaid, letting patient camerawork absorb the emotional information each character tries to withhold.

Matsumura, whose credits include “The Lump in My Heart” (2023), favors very still camera movement and deliberate observation. He has set himself a rule against using handheld camerawork in his films.

“All the cameras are becoming all compact right now, and you see all these videos shown on YouTube and social media that are shot by those cameras,” he says. “And so I wanted to differentiate what I show on the big screen with that kind of content. That is one of the reasons why. The second reason is that I want to capture the emotion of the actors truthfully, slowly.”

There’s a fascinating contrast in how “Between Us” seeks emotional realism but finds it through very measured, precise camerawork, particularly in how it turns the emotional distance between Makoto and Kasumi into literal distance through the blocking of each scene.

“What was more difficult to portray was [that] though they are apart, they are feeling the existence of the other,” Matsumura says, “and I wanted to show that with the use of the eyes and use of the space: though there was a physical space [between them], they kind of had each other in mind, and I wanted to express that through other elements.”

The drama club has lost members because Kasumi takes it so seriously that others feel they can’t keep up. Even after Makoto joins the club, the two are often shot far apart, but Matsumura shows the mending through a rather simple editing decision: cutting the girls’ separate read-throughs as though they are trading lines, with each cut bringing them closer than ever before, even though they aren’t in the same room.

“The play is a fiction, but they are speaking in their own language,” he says. “And by saying their lines, they are able to say what they were not able to say in the real world, and by doing that, their distance becomes closer.”

The script Kasumi discovers, which gives the film its title, becomes what begins to mend their relationship, quite literally bringing them closer together.

The intimate story has big-picture beginnings. Matsumura found inspiration in a run of disasters, starting with the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

“There was the pandemic. There is the war going on around the world, and [it] was a period in my life when I thought it is impossible for one to connect with others,” he says. “So I just wanted to make a very simple film with two people, two human beings facing the other way, and to make them look at each other, and [ask] what kind of energy is born from that?”

The story has nothing to do with those events in a literal sense, Matsumura says. What ties them to the past trauma linking Makoto and Kasumi’s families is that both are “unresolved.”

“I think that reflects the current situation where the earthquake, the nuclear power plant, the war, if it’s on the media, we look into it. But once it’s not on the news, we feel that it’s kind of in the past solved, but it’s really not in reality,” he says.

With his two leads, “there was no specific direction that I gave them,” Matsumura says. “This is a characteristic that they have as an actress – it’s a common characteristic – but they have interest in others, and they listen to others closely, and they take in their words and make it their own, and they have this trait. It was very natural for them to actually perform these two characters, and I just let them freely perform what they felt like.”

Matsumura’s visually organized approach, paired with naturalistic performances, makes for a striking result, one that also shows the range of styles across this year’s Nippon Cinema Now lineup.

“There is really no [singular] mainstream in the Japanese cinema now,” Matsumura says. “But one thing that is common is that the financing, the budget that we have for one film is very limited in Japan – it’s not like in the U.S. And because of that, there is a limit to what we can portray, the concept that we can portray in one film.”

That isn’t always a negative thing, he adds. “We are all trying to make a film about a subject that is within our reach, but we’re not reaching for all the same things. We’re reaching for all different things, and that is the current Japanese cinema environment. So we’re not making a film about one big subject. Each of us are all making films about [a] variety of small subjects.”

Matsumura says he is at a crossroads himself. “I could follow my instinct and make an artistic film, and express what is inside of me, or I could make a film for the mass audience – I won’t be facing with myself, but I’ll be facing more towards society or the audience that watches the film,” he says. “I don’t know which way I’ll go, as of now.”