Japan has nearly 3 million foreign residents, about 2.3 percent of the population as of 2019, but in Japanese movies non-natives are seldom more than walk-ons. One reason, as any producer here will tell you: Japanese audiences relate better to Japanese characters.
Akio Fujimoto rejects this supposed box-office logic. His 2017 debut feature, “Passage of Life,” focused on a Myanmar family living a precarious existence in Tokyo. The heroines of his second film, “Along the Sea,” are three Vietnamese women working as technical trainees in northern Japan in the dead of winter.
Both films are based on true stories, with actors playing characters close to their lived experience. And both resemble observational documentaries, with no music and no narration.