‘My Sunshine’ Review: Wistful Ice Dancing Tale Confirms Hiroshi Okuyama As Emerging Japanese Filmmaker – Cannes Film Festival

deadline.com:

In Japan the very first few snowflakes begin to fall signaling the change of seasons. Another clue is we see young Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama) and his baseball-playing buddies taking those final swings at bat and moving on to ice hockey.

That is basically how this quiet and lilting charmer of a coming-of-age story is introduced, and it sets the table perfectly for what is to follow.

Only the second narrative feature film for promising 28-year-old filmmaker Hiroshi Okuyama, whose first film 2018’s Jesus like this one also dealt with children, My Sunshine does not come from his own childhood experiences but is a story about figure skating, or in this case ice dancing, with which he has always been fascinated but never had a way in.

Finally listening over and over to Humbert Humbert’s song “My Sunshine,” he not only got the English-language title for the film, but also enough inspiration to write the original screenplay.