You Are The Film

Anyone familiar with Makoto Ueda’s highly enjoyable brain scrambler Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, will probably have some idea of what he’s come up with for his film debut.

Madoka (Ito Marika) is a playwright who is struggling to get her productions off the ground and facing resentment from her troupe. To get away from it for a while she goes to a boutique cinema and begins to watch a film about a band that are having problems selling tickets for their concert. Equally frustrated Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) goes to what appears to be the same cinema.

Its not long before they realise they are watching each other’s lives unfurl on film and they can contact each other. Here they try and help each other out as they witness what their respective band and troupe are saying about them.

Ueda doesn’t do very much to explain how any of this is happening with scientific gobbledegook he just lobs in ‘cinematic multiverse’ and leaves it that. At sixty-eight minutes there’s not much time for any great depth to anything.

And yet Ueda does cover the genuine issues that beset small time am-dram, such as finances, and actors’ ambitions, however deluded. That almost parallels band issues such as finances (no getting away from those) and the well-worn ‘musical differences’ explanation when groups/members grow apart and split/leave.

There’s the hanging cloud of the absurd all over You Are the Film as Madoka and Kazuma soon dispense with thinking about the situation too much and get stuck into their mutual objective.

The only one who gets truly exasperated is the man in the ticket booth with the constant coming and going.

You Are the Film had its UK premiere at Tubi FrightFest London, August 2026.