Koji Fukada leads a younger generation of Japanese directors who are more internationally minded than their predecessors. He even used French export titles for his first two features — "Hospitalite" (2010) and "Au Revoir l'Ete" (2013) — reflecting the influence of French cinema, particularly the work of Eric Rohmer. Also, he cast American actress Bryerly Long as the star of "Sayonara," his 2015 sci-fi movie about a dying woman being cared for by a humanoid robot in a doomed world.
In his latest, the evocative — if frustratingly diffuse — "The Man from the Sea," Fukada takes this internationalism several steps further: Based on his own script, he shot the film in Banda Aceh, the capital of Indonesia's Aceh Province. Two of his lead actors are Indonesian and much of the dialogue is in Indonesian and English.
The main story is less local than transcendental, though. While referencing the Japanese wartime occupation and the 2004 tsunami that killed an estimated 167,000 people in Aceh, it has its own mythos unrelated to the Islam most Acehnese follow. It's like setting the second coming on Enoshima: unexpected if not necessarily absurd.