SYNOPSIS
After Kiriko discovers her husband at their home with a mistress, she is forced to maintain appearances for the sake of preserving their young daughter’s perception of her father. In the hours following this horrific revelation, Kiriko must face the hardest decision a mother can: will she sacrifice her daughter’s happiness or her own?
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The Quiet Pain was created as my senior thesis film and I had no idea how I would reach this point. At its inception, I had more of a feeling and style in mind than a concrete plot. I struggled for many months to find the story until my DP Nick asked me “What kind of Japanese movie would you want to watch?" From there, everything began to click. I distilled the structure and contents of many Golden Age 1950’s Japanese films, primarily women-focused family dramas usually revolving around the theme of infidelity, and used those building blocks to sculpt my own version of this tried-and-true way of making films.
I have loved making movies since I was a teenager and have loved watching movies since I was a small child living in Japan, far away from my family and friends. Now, as an adult, they’re still a great way for me to see the world at different times, even allowing me to “return” back to my second home for two immersive hours of Japanese cinema. To be able to make a film at a scale far beyond anything that I have ever done before and to have it be such a personal rendition of a style I love will forever be one of the greatest joys of my life. I am incredibly proud of everything my team and I have created and hope that you will feel connected to the universal emotions on display here. They are ones we all feel around the world.
