Saito Kisin's 'Kefi' Turns a Father's Death Into Surrealism in Tokyo

Cinematographer Saito Kisin's debut feature "Kefi," likely the strangest entry at this year's Tokyo International Film Festival, uses aliens, dinosaurs and dream affairs to work through a complicated relationship with his late father. The film screens in the festival's Nippon Cinema Now section.

"Kefi" began as something more conventional: four short films stitched into a feature. "Initially, I wanted to do four series of short films and put it together, and that would become a feature," Saito says. "And those four would all have individual themes. So the first one would be ethics. Second would be hypocrisy. There would be discrimination, and fourth would be life and death."

The youngest of three brothers, Saito planned to loosely mirror his own family through three sisters on screen. Then, in 2024, his father died. The film's opening echoes that news: shortly after a scene in which the absent father speaks about his daughters in narration — an echo from beyond the grave — the three sisters learn of his death. The sisters are oldest Kyo, middle child Asumi and youngest Kino. Like Saito's own father, theirs had been separated from the family since the parents' divorce.

What does grief look like without sadness?

The festival program is upfront about the film's aim: exploring the complicated feelings that follow a loss, including numbness. Saito's own experience drove that focus.

"To tell you the truth, when my father passed, I didn't feel sad," Saito says. "Well, the reason being my parents divorced about 10 years ago, I haven't met him for about 10 or so years."

He frames the absence of conventional grief as part of who both men were. "I'm an optimistic person; my father was a very funny guy. That also added to the fact that there wasn't much grief in his loss, and I thought that I would meet again with him and talk with him again soon, but that became so sudden," he says. "I realized that not everybody goes through grief when they lose their loved ones. So that idea came to me, and I wanted to depict that perspective through the three sisters."

The sisters spend much of the film's compact runtime apart rather than together, a structural choice Saito defends directly. "Just because you're family, you're not always together, it's not like you always share something, always," he says. "Your siblings lead their separate lives, but at the very end, siblings or families think about the same things or have the same mindset." One episode eventually reunites them.

One person, five jobs

Visually, "Kefi" switches between vivid color and monochrome, between chaotic handheld work and steadier camerawork. Saito says the variation wasn't thematically mapped. "It's only because I wanted to test and try different approaches. That's why it ended up as it is," he says, adding: "I think it's important that people stay interested and will be attentive."

His credits on the film list director, writer, cinematographer, gaffer and editor. The hands-on method comes down to comfort — it's simply how he knows how to make films. "That's why my style is to use a single-lens reflex camera, I use iMovie and have my friends appear as actors," he says, noting he uses the same tools for YouTube while working behind the camera on bigger productions.

Big sets, he says, dilute intent. "Sometimes not everybody's looking in the same direction, and so sometimes that becomes kind of a noise when you're trying to make a film," Saito says. "And so what I really wanted to do was make a film only with people I really trust."

Beyond Ozu and Kurosawa

Saito also wants "Kefi" to widen the world's picture of Japanese cinema. "When you think about Japanese films done by Japanese people, people would imagine anime or films with [mainstream appeal]," he says. "But I think that's a shame. I feel that there's more interesting, more funny, more unique Japanese people in the world, so I really want to show that to people around the world through film."

He ties that ambition to his multi-role workflow, which he says conveys his point of view more directly. "I just want to prove that Japanese films are not only about those classic filmmakers like Ozu or Kurosawa, but there are more modern people like Hamaguchi, or even myself," Saito says. "That is my aspiration."

With its festival platform secured, "Kefi" now carries that argument to international audiences — one alien, dinosaur and divided family at a time.