Earthlings in Love Debuts as TIFF's First Microdrama — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Earthlings in Love became the first so-called microdrama, or vertical drama, to premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival, after circulating as a 30-part social-media series.
- Shinichiro Ueda recut the original 76-minute presentation into a 102-minute TIFF version, expanding the material while retaining its 9:16 framing.
- Shinpei returns home for a former classmate’s funeral and tries to recall an unfinished zero-budget school sci-fi while coping with early-onset dementia.
- The 9:16 format turns the film’s constraints into a narrative device: waist-up dialogue compositions and small horizontal pans reveal information omitted from earlier scenes.
- Shinpei’s AI memory service reconstructs the past from photos and diary entries but mainly reflects his faulty recollections; Ueda says it is not intended as commentary on AI.
- The 2000 high-school flashbacks draw on Shinichiro Ueda’s experience as a prolific amateur filmmaker, though the review notes that he has not been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
- Earthlings in Love earned a favorable review despite its familiar themes of high-school nostalgia and missed connections, and the film is seeking U.S. distribution.
Why it matters: Ueda’s 102-minute TIFF cut demonstrates that a 30-part, 9:16 social series can become a feature without losing its native visual grammar. The trade-off is explicit in the review: the formal invention is fresh, while the high-school-nostalgia plot remains familiar and sometimes overly sentimental.
Ask SkimNews
