Japanese director Kei Ishikawa’s subtle period drama, A Pale View of Hills, was born of a conversation and a shared admiration.

“A producer asked if I’d be interested in working on a Kazuo Ishiguro novel,” the director recalls. “Like many Japanese filmmakers, I’ve long admired Ishiguro – but it was daunting and we would be starting from zero. At that point, the rights hadn’t even been secured. It was all just passion.”Ishikawa says he settled on pursuing A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro’s 1982 debut, because it was one of only two novels the author set in Japan and it remained un-adapted for the screen.  “[Broadcaster NHK] had done a version of An Artist of the Floating World, his other Japan-set novel, and we heard that various Japanese directors — like Kiyoshi Kurosawa — had considered adapting A Pale View of Hills, but it hadn’t worked out for some reason,” Ishikawa recalls. “So we decided to go after it ourselves.”

Ishiguro responded to their inquiries by saying he was gratified by the prospect, having always hoped a Japanese filmmaker of a younger generation would attempt to adapt his debut novel, since cross-generational historical inheritance is so key to its themes. What followed was a deeply collaborative adaptation process, with Ishiguro both granting the rights and joining the production as an executive producer. 

“I was very fortunate,” says Ishikawa. “He had just finished writing the screenplay for Living (Oliver Hermanus’s 2022 adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic, Ikiru), so he came to the process with a filmmaker’s mindset. He gave me detailed notes on the script.

“A slippery meditation on memory, trauma, and historical inheritance echoing across continents and generations, A Pale View of Hills, premieres in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section on TK. It follows Ishikawa’s mystery thriller adaptation of Japanese author Keiichiro Hirano’s novel, A Man, which premiered to strong reviews at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. 

The new film traces the memories of Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England in 1982, as she reflects on her early life in postwar Nagasaki. Prompted by the suicide of her eldest daughter, she begins recounting memories from her prior life in Japan involving a seemingly unrelated friendship with a mysterious woman named Sachiko, who dreamed of emigrating to the U.S. with her young daughter. But as Etsuko’s British-born daughter, Niki, probes her mother with questions, inconsistencies in the narrative — which play on screen as lengthy flashbacks — begin to emerge. Who is remembering whom? And what do those memories conceal? During development, Ishikawa traveled to London to sit down with Ishiguro for lengthy conversations about the script, an experience he describes as revelatory. “He told me what he thought worked in the novel, what didn’t, and how it could evolve. It was like working with a script doctor — if your script doctor had a Nobel Prize.”He adds: “At one point, I considered referencing the Chernobyl disaster in the U.K. scenes, but he suggested the Greenham Common anti-nuclear protests instead — linking it to women’s rights and activism. That became a key thematic touchstone.”

Despite the close collaboration, Ishiguro made a point of stepping back to give Ishikawa space during post-production. “He didn’t want to give notes during editing,” the director says. “He believed the final vision should come from one filmmaker, and he worried that his input might carry too much weight. But his stance on this did influence some of the other producers, affirming that my vision should be respected. It was a difficult moment for me in the creative process and this helped me a lot.”

Ishikawa’s vision finds subtle power in what’s left unsaid. The 1950s Nagasaki scenes are haunted by the aftershocks and trauma of the war, though the atomic bombing is never depicted directly. “For many Japanese filmmakers, there’s a moment when you feel the need to confront that legacy,” Ishikawa says. “It’s difficult. We’re generations removed, and those with firsthand memories are passing on. But we still inherit that past. That’s where Ishiguro’s use of the unreliable narrator becomes so meaningful. It’s not just a literary device—it’s a way of acknowledging the vagueness of memory and history.”

A Pale View of Hills explores history as personal mythology, with fractured memories shaping a narrative that’s affecting but deeply ambiguous. “There’s a line in the film where the daughter says, ‘I probably don’t understand everything about you and your time,’” Ishikawa notes. “That’s the feeling I wanted to evoke. Even if we can’t fully understand the past, we can try to inherit something essential from it.”

The film’s cinematography, rendered in painterly frames by Polish DP Piotr Niemyjski, deliberately evokes the aesthetic of Japan’s post-war greats, names like Ozu and Naruse, whom Ishiguro has specifically cited as an influence on his writing about the period. The film’s haunting score was written by fellow Polishman Paweł Mykietyn (Ishikawa studied filmmaking at Poland’s National Film School and A Pale View of Hills is co-produced by Polish indie banner Lava Films). 

Ishikawa makes two bold departures from the novel: the framing perspective is shifted to Niki in England in the 1980s, and the film opens and closes with British post-punk band New Order’s debut single, “Ceremony,” from 1981.  

“It’s rare for a Japanese film to use that kind of music, but I wanted to be bold and it felt right,” Ishikawa says. “The 1980s were a golden age of music. ‘Ceremony’ touches on themes of mortality and longing. The mood, as well as the title itself, was fitting.”The film also benefits from what Ishikawa describes as his dream cast. Cannes veteran Suzu Hirose (Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister) plays young Etsuko with a luminous fragility, while Yoh Yoshida (Desperate Sunflowers) portrays the older version of the character with enigmatic gravity. Fumi Nikaido as Sachiko brings the same piercing appeal that she displayed in FX’s hit series Shōgun, and veteran Tomokazu Miura (House, Perfect Days) gives a quietly devastating performance as Etsuko’s father, a former wartime educator and propagandist struggling to find his place in Japan’s fast-changing post-war era. 

“He’s very much an Ishiguro character,” says Ishikawa of the father. “Some people suggested cutting his scenes because he’s not essential to the main narrative, but I didn’t want to do it. Ishiguro once told me that he couldn’t fully explore the father figure in Pale View, so he carried that character over into The Remains of the Day. That fascinated me — the idea that a character could live on across novels. Even with his problematic past, the father remains deeply sympathetic, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. That’s the Ishiguro magic.”