“Confetti,” the opening film at last year's Skip City International D-Cinema Festival and Naoya Fujita’s feature debut, is a fresh, sweet-spirited take on the venerable seishun eiga (youth film) genre.
The setup of a boy transferring to a Tokyo middle school is a genre staple, but almost everything else about the film, based on an original script by Suzuyuki Kaneko, is not. The protagonist, Yuki (Shion Matsufuji), plays female roles for his father’s traveling taishū engeki (popular theater) troupe. At first, he conceals this fact from his new classmates, not out of shame or embarrassment but because he will only be with them a month before moving on. “I don’t need friends,” he says.
But he soon acquires two new pals — the top academic stars in his math class. One, Ken (Jun Saito), has stopped coming to school out of boredom, while the other, Maya (Sara Hayama), was once Ken’s girlfriend, but still worries about his welfare.