Kani Releasing Acquires North America Rights To Japanese Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Title ‘Desert Of Namibia’

EXCLUSIVE: Kani Releasing has acquired North American rights to Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert Of Namibia from Japan’s Happinet Phantom Studios Corp.

The youth drama, starring popular newcomer Yuumi Kawai (Look Back, Plan 75), premiered in Directors Fortnight at this year’s Cannes film festival, where it won the FIPRESCI prize, and is scheduled to screen at the inaugural Directors’ Fortnight Extended in Los Angeles this weekend.

Yamanaka’s second feature following 2018 award-winning drama To methe film is about a disaffected 21-year-old working in a beauty salon, where the expectations placed on women her age are difficult to ignore.

Bored with her boyfriend, she begins a new relationship that quickly become volatile and prompts her to take a few steps inside the desert of her emotions. Daichi Kaneko (It’s A Summer Film) and Kanichiro Sato (It’s bad) also star.

Kani Releasing is planning a spring 2025 theatrical release for the film.

Directors’ Fortnight Extended is taking place in Los Angeles in The Culver Theater this weekend (November 1-3). The global extension to the Cannes parallel selection has also been to Recife in Brazil (October 15-20), New York (October 25-27) and will next head to Tokyo, where it will take place at the Human Trust Shibuya (December 6-19).

Yamanaka was just 19 years old when To me won the Audience Award at Japan’s Pia Film Festival and went on to screen at Berlin and several other film festivals. Her other works include contributions to the anthology film 21st Century Girl (2021), and short films Born Pisces (2020) and See You On The Other Side (2022).

“Yamanaka is one of the most uncompromising and exciting filmmakers working today, committed to a stubbornly personal body-of-work that examines and upends tropes about womanhood in the Japanese context,” said Kani Releasing co-founder and artistic director Ariel Esteban Cayer. “Two features in, she has already crafted a unique oeuvre of scalding, confrontational honesty.”

The Cannes FIPRESCI jury praised the film for its “intrepid exploration of contemporary shades of neurodivergence, captured through images that ceaselessly probe the distance between its central characters as they navigate the spaces of 21st century Japan.”