The Ainu, an indigenous people who live mainly in Hokkaido, have long been a marginal presence in Japanese cinema. And the rare Ainu characters, found in such films as Tomu Uchida's "The Outsiders" (1958) and Lee Sang-il's "Unforgiven" (2013), are mostly portrayed, albeit sympathetically, by Japanese actors.
But in his second dramatic feature, "Ainu Mosir," Takeshi Fukunaga not only makes the Ainu central to the story, but has also cast nonactors of Ainu ancestry to play the leading Ainu roles, making his film an outlier indeed.
Fukunaga did something similar in his 2015 debut feature, “Out of My Hand,” which told stories of Liberian immigrants in New York and included a cast of Liberian nonactors. His focus in both films, brilliantly realized, was to give an insider’s perspective to his stories of marginalized communities.