WASABI – NOT A FAIRY TALE

A Woman Reinvents Herself to Exact Revenge

Venue: Osaka Theater Seven (Mar. 16 to Mar. 23, 2024), Nagoya Cinema Skhole (TBA)
Official website: hemafilms.com/wasabi/
Theater website: www.theater-seven.com/itiran.html
Theater website: www.cinemaskhole.co.jp/cinema/html/home.htm
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhkAB7V1Udk&t=1s&ab_channel=HemaFilms

Advance tickets: https://k2-cinema.com/en/purchase.pdf
Talk event: Every day after the screening. Visit theater website for details.

Title: 復讐のワサビ (Fukushu no Wasabi)
Director: Hemant Singh (ヘマント・シン)
Duration: 119 min

There’s more good news for filmmaking diversity in Japan, where the number of locally based non-Japanese directors has begun at last to expand. It’s one thing to make a film in Japan, in Japanese; it’s quite another to find a distributor and get a theatrical release. But Indian-born director Hemant Singh has done just that with his feature debut, Wasabi — Not a Fairy Tale, a mashup of family drama, coming-of-age story, revenge thriller and yakuza actioner. There’s also room for touches of black humor.

Kano (an impressive Julian Koike), a young woman who has been bullied since childhood because of the scars on her face, manages to survive adolescence because of her secret superpower, which is revealed in one of the film’s visually showstopping scenes. Following the sudden loss of her alcoholic mother (Miho Fujiwara), Kano begins to take charge of her own future, leaving her harsh past behind and reinventing herself as Wasabi.

Wasabi is bent on revenge, and she pulls together a ragtag team of friends, including her mother’s boyfriend, Hiro (Keisuke Nomura), to begin executing her carefully calibrated plans. What follows is never predictable — and while Singh says that he wrote the script during the pandemic lockdown, wanting to focus on the importance of love and kindness to others during a time when so many people were becoming isolated, it’s not the love and kindness that you’re apt to remember.

Cinema K2: Shimokita Ekimae Cinema