Covering Cannes Film Festival from a distance is a complicated business. Films screening in competition are under strict embargo, so I’m having to interview Japanese Brazilian director Andre Hayato Saito without having watched his latest short, “Amarela.”
“I can do some spoilers,” the 39-year-old filmmaker jokes, speaking over video chat from his home outside Sao Paulo the day before he flies to France for the festival.
“Amarela,” which is competing for the short film Palme d’Or, is part of a trilogy that delves into Saito’s family history and cultural background. For the 2022 documentary “Kokoro to Kokoro,” he traveled to Japan to meet a close friend of his late grandmother, who had emigrated to Brazil and raised a family of 10 children.