My Sunshine · reception & legacy
2024 · Hiroshi Okuyama
How My Sunshine has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It arrived at Cannes 2024 in Un Certain Regard as the word-of-mouth 'hidden gem' of the festival — Thierry Frémaux hyped Okuyama as possibly 'the next Kore-eda' — and over its 2024–25 rollout it settled into life as a quietly treasured little winter film rather than a prize magnet.
What's debated
The fight is all about the late swerve: after an hour of snow-hushed ice-rink idyll the film abruptly confronts homophobia and then ends on an open note, and viewers split over whether that rupture is the whole point or an underdeveloped deflation of everything cozy that came before.
Its footprint
Among online film folk it circulates as a seasonal comfort watch — the pastel snow, kids wobbling to 'Clair de Lune' — the kind of film that gets pulled out and recommended when the first snow falls.
Where it stands
A minor-key Letterboxd favourite and the film that marked Okuyama as a Japanese director to watch, beloved by the 'gentle cinema' crowd rather than canonised.