North American Premiere
In Kohei Igarashi’s haunting, mysterious film, Sano (Hiroshi Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) return to the seaside town where Sano met his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) five years ago. Nagi is now deceased, and the trip is part of an attempt to exorcise Sano’s grief. Eventually, the director takes us back in time, showing the couple’s first meeting…
Kohei shoots in long takes, portraying the action in a cool, distanced manner that allows for contemplation even as the story remains engrossing. Sano and Nagi’s strange, felicitous first meeting is key to the film’s themes of chance, personality, and the strange and often cruel ways they intersect. Hiroshi Sano gives a fine performance, exuding dazed grief in the film’s opening section and altering his technique with the leap back to happier times. Super Happy Forever is a deceptively casual film: beneath the placid surface lies something dark and unnameable yet somehow recognizable.
Supported by
Media Partner
Community Partner
Hiroshi Sano, Yoshinori Miyata, Nairu Yamamoto, Hoang Nhu Quynh
Japan/France
2024
In Japanese with English subtitles
At SFU Woodwards
At Fifth Avenue
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Kohei Igarashi, Kenshi Otaka, Misaki Kawamura, Satoshi Takata, Go Kitahara, Takashi Omatsu
Producer
Makoto Oki, Yusaku Emoto
Screenwriter
Kohei Igarashi, Koichi Kubodera
Cinematography
Wataru Takahashi
Editor
Keiko Okawa, Kohei Igarashi, Damien Manivel
Production Design
Masato Nunobe
Original Music
Daigo Sakuragi
Kohei Igarashi 五十嵐耕平
Born in 1983 in Shizuoka Prefecture, Kohei Igarashi directed his first feature film Voice of Rain That Comes at Night (2008) while studying at Tokyo’s Zokei University and went on to win the Korean Critics’ Prize at Cinema Digital Seoul 2008. His second feature film Hold Your Breath Like a Lover (2014), his final work at the Graduate School of Cinema and New Media at the Tokyo University of the Arts, competed at the 67th Locarno International Film Festival. Takara, La nuit ou j’ai nagé (2017), co-directed with French filmmaker Damien Manivel, was selected at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. In 2023, he presented the short film Two of Us at the San Sebastian Film Festival, a sort of prequel to Super Happy Forever.
Filmography: Voice of Rain That Comes at Night (2008); Hold Your Breath Like a Lover (2014); Takara, La nuit ou j’ai nagé (2017)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Georgia O'Keeffe: the Brightness of Light
Drawing on her copious correspondence and the world's leading scholars, this is a definitive documentary on the life and work of "the mother of American Modernism."
The Miracle Worker
Academy Awards went to Best Actress Anne Bancroft and Best Supporting Actress Patty Duke for their moving portrayals of Annie Sullivan and her remarkable blind and deaf pupil, Helen Keller. "A film that storms where most biopics respectfully tiptoe."
Ghosts of the Sea
Imagine an especially poetic true crime podcast about a sailor who built his own sailboat and lived on the high seas, but lost not one, but two wives along the way... Now imagine it told from the vantage point of his daughter: Ghosts of the Sea.
Inedia
Liz Cairns makes a mesmerizing feature debut that sees a young woman suffering from mysterious food allergies join a remote island community practicing alternative healing methods. She soon realizes that not everything is as it seems.
Apocalypse in the Tropics
An Academy Award nominee for Edge of Democracy, Petra Costa returns with a fascinating take on how the Evangelical movement has taken Brazil by storm and worked with the right to undermine the constitutional separation of Church and State.