“It’s amazing to be able to create something that others don’t understand at all.” So says an elderly woman to the aspiring punk singer-songwriter of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz, one of the finest films from last year’s Japan Cuts festival. It could just as well be the theme for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn, one of a remarkable 12 films Ugana has released since 2022. The Gesuidouz is about a punk band making a hit song after weeks of struggle and labor, and, more importantly, the struggle to make another great song after that initial success. I Fell in Love is more conventional in its structure, but no lesser for it. It tells exactly the story its title promises, like all z-grade films must.
Ui Mihara stars as Shina, a young and successful actress in the Japanese pop film industry who has become disillusioned with her work. This is revealed in a remarkable opening sequence where she is being interviewed during a press junket and cannot contain her boredom with and loathing disdain for the empty-headed reporter questioning her, repeatedly looking not at her interrogator, but rather directly into the camera as she delivers hostile and ambivalent answers. Ugana will end the film with another instance of Mihara looking directly at us, but by that time her entire world will have changed.
This happens after she and her boyfriend travel on vacation to New York. They break up on the streets after her incessant complaining, and she loses her phone, her wallet, and her luggage. She ends up in a bar, getting hammered on shots from a sympathetic bartender (she doesn’t speak English, and no one she meets speaks Japanese) and falls in with a crowd of punk filmmakers lead by Jack (Estevan Muñoz), a movie-mad puppy dog about to direct his first feature, but his lead actress drops out the night before shooting starts. One thing leads to another and Mihara is the new leading lady, though none of the crew knows if she has any acting experience.
The rest of I Fell in Love follows the shoot, as Shina — and by extension, the rest of us — is carried away by Jack’s love of film and filmmaking. In turn, the entire crew is blown away by Shina’s acting skill and star power, as she delivers a level of craft and professionalism that far exceeds anything they’re used to seeing. As it must in the movies, work turns into romance between our heroes, but really Ugana’s film is more about discovering the joy in one’s work, and realizing that only at the margins of success, where the work is done not for money or fame or power, can that joy truly be found. I Fell in Love is packed with references to and cameos from the world of no-budget filmmaking, names like Larry Fessenden and Lloyd Kauffman, and the pace and subject matter of Ugana’s career to date seems to be aspiring to their footsteps (the band’s first album in The Gesuidouz was titled Toxic Avengers Infinity War). Muñoz too appears to come from that world, and his earnest performance, like a Fred Armisen character played with a complete lack of irony, reflects the honest enthusiasm and joy of making movies. Mihara’s work is more nuanced, selling both her character’s ennui and her gradual realization of the film’s core principle: Work doesn’t have to be work. It can, if you want, be play as well.
Published as part of First Look 2026.
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