Streamlined Guides: Japan Indie Producers - From 'The Truth' To 'Renoir'

In the second section of this three-part Streamlined Guide to Japan’s Independent Producers, we profile six producers we believe represent a new generation in the sense that they’re working across borders, tapping into the international sales and festival circuit, and finding innovative methods of financing and distributing Japanese films. The third and final section of this report will profile an additional six producers.

Streamlined was not expecting to find so many strong candidates for this report, but that just shows how the Japanese film industry is changing, along with the fact that exactly half of the selected producers are women, although we didn’t plan it that way.

Another sign that the industry is becoming much more international is the fact that these producers are living between Tokyo and many other destinations. Over the summer, we conducted interviews with people in London, New York, Vancouver and Paris. Now that the autumn festival season has started, you may be able to meet these producers in Venice, Toronto, San Sebastian, Busan, and of course, back home in Tokyo.

As always, these guides are completely funded by readers so the information in the report has been researched independently of any financial support from advertisers and/or film agencies. Contact details are not included in the report, but paid subscribers can DM me to discuss the best way to approach listed companies, with Founding Member subscribers receiving priority on their queries.

Miyuki Fukuma
Bunbuku

Credits: The Truth, Broker, A Pale View Of Hills

Miyuki Fukuma says she fell into producing almost by accident. She’d been thinking about a career in film while doing postgraduate work in comparative culture and arts management in Tokyo and Geneva, drawn to the ability of cinema to create connections across languages and cultures.

When her landlord pointed out a job opening for a role in international business at a production company, she found herself sitting across a table from Hirokazu Kore-eda, who at the time had just launched his award-winning Nobody Knows in Cannes.
 
She started working with Kore-eda on the international strategy of his subsequent films, including Still Walking and Air Doll, before becoming one of the founding members of his Tokyo-based Bunbuku production company, established in 2014.
 
After attending project markets in Paris and Hong Kong, Fukuma says it was a natural progression to start exploring international co-productions, starting with The Truth (2019), a co-production with France starring Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, which was Kore-eda’s first film outside Japan and received its world premiere at Venice film festival. She also gained early experience working on French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe’s 2014 experimental short Untitled (Human Mask) and omnibus Ten Years Japan (2018), which Kore-eda executive produced.
 
“The landscape was different then: the industry more inward-looking, the support systems less developed for this kind of work. But that also meant there was real space to pioneer something,” Fukuma says. “And for someone like me who came to this work from outside the traditional path, that felt like exactly the right place to build something of my own.”
 
Fukuma says she was also struck by how many women she met on the crew of The Truth; and how many had continued their careers after having children. “It was a kind of quiet proof that it’s possible, and it’s part of what drives my own commitment to better working conditions back at home.”

Following her experience in France, Fukuma worked on Broker (2022), Kore-eda’s first Korean-language project, starring Song Kang-ho; and Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View Of Hills (2025), adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, which was co-produced with the UK’s Number 9 Films and Poland’s Lava Films. Both films premiered in Cannes.
 
She also produced Kore-eda’s critically-acclaimed series Asura (2025), about four adult sisters who discover their elderly father has a mistress and an illegitimate child, which was produced by Bunbuku and licensed to Netflix.
 
Fukuma observes there are both practical and creative reasons for Japanese independent producers to pursue international co-productions – and that working internationally also enables Japanese filmmakers and producers to gain new perspectives on their work: “Crossing borders and stepping into unfamiliar territory is, above all, a way to unlock what a project and its creators are truly capable of. At the same time, it forces you to step outside and see your own assumptions and environment from a distance: about how to get films made and financed, about working conditions, about whose stories are worth telling for whom now.
 
“It keeps me humble and willing to keep improving. It's demanding work, but the films and the sets that come out of it tend to be richer, with more discoveries, for it,” Fukuma says.
 
She also acknowledges the obstacles faced by Japan’s producers; the lack of official co-production treaties, which limits access to funding on the partner country’s side; the lack of public funding in Japan for mid-sized productions; and the oft-overlooked issue of contract language and business customs. “Japanese and Western production agreements are often built on different assumptions and ways of thinking – around copyrights, creative control, IP ownership, fiscal years, delivery schedules,” Fukuma says.
 
“Negotiating across those differences takes a real appetite for mutual learning, specialist legal support, and significant trust built through fair and open dialogue. That infrastructure is still developing in Japan.”
 
On the funding issue, she says what would be most useful for Japanese indie producers would be the return of dedicated support for mid-sized productions, ideally structured across multiple fiscal years, and with partial disbursement before completion: “Large-scale productions have their own support now, and rightly so – but restoring this tier would make these programmes genuinely count for the projects and producers who need them most, and help strengthen the diversity and international competitiveness of Japanese cinema.”