Director Satoshi Miki's new comedy "Ore Ore (It's Me, it's Me)" is more on the cultish than the commercial end of the scale, with its head-scratcher of a story about a first-time scammer who starts encountering various versions of himself in a bizarre new world: karmic payback for impersonating a stranger via a stolen cellphone to the man's own mother.

Miki admitted as much to me when we met at the Udine Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, where "It's Me, it's Me" had its world premiere on April 19. Nervously puffing a cigarette at the welcoming dinner, held at a restaurant next to Udine's historic hilltop castle, he thanked me for recommending his "hard to understand" film to the festival as a program advisor. "(Starring actor Kazuya) Kamenashi is the reason it's getting all this attention," he added, referring to the media uproar at home when the film's selection for an opening-night slot was announced.

Not that Miki was a nonentity, even in this small Northern Italian city. With his long hair, scraggly beard, dark glasses and ball cap, he was easy to pick out in a crowd. More importantly, his films had been the subject of a special section we screened, with Miki present, at the festival's 2008 edition and his face was still familiar to many local fans.