Several years ago, a film project of mine was selected for J-Pitch, a government-backed initiative that introduces new filmmakers to veteran producers outside Japan, in the hope (in my case, a faint hope) that they will co-produce an original film. At a J-Pitch seminar where new filmmakers delivered their pitches to the assembled producers, one standout was a rail-thin and tightly wound young director named Hiroshi Nakajima.

He made his pitch in rapid-fire American English while quickly covering a whiteboard with his downward-slanting scrawl. Given that the rest of us had laboriously prepared PowerPoint slides, his hyper, off-the-cuff presentation struck me as either bold (if it worked) or crazy (if it didn't).

As it turned out, Nakajima was not crazy. His J-Pitch project never got off the ground, but he has since made two features in the U.S.: "Lily," a semi-autobiographical drama about a young scriptwriter's professional and romantic dilemmas, released in Japan in 2011, and now, "The Secret Children," a sci-fi drama based on Nakajima's screenplay about a near-future society in which a new government decides to eliminate thousands of human clones produced under a previous regime. Rather than submit to their fate, the clones go underground to survive, while government agents ruthlessly hunt them down.