Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2018: #87. Koji Fukada’s The Man from the Sea

The Man from the Sea

Japan’s Koju Fukada scored his greatest international breakthrough to date when he took home the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for his fifth feature, Harmonium. His latest, The Man from the Sea, is a French-Japanese-Indonesian co-production which concerns a man who is washed up on the shore in Indonesia speaking a broken mixture of Japanese and Indonesian, and is apparently based on Fukada’s experiences while visiting the country in 2012. The stranger’s presence causes some miraculous happenings, which eventually leads to suspicion among the locals.

Release Date/Prediction: Before Harmonium’s bow at Cannes, Fukada’s early filmography premiered mostly out of the Tokyo International Film Festival, and his 2015 Sayonara went to Rotterdam. We’re assuming Fukada’s award out of Cannes should ensure another placement at the 2018 program, perhaps once again in Regard (filming took place over the summer of 2017), while a domestic release for early 2018 has been mentioned.