In My Father’s Room: The Art of Absence and Reconciliation
A reflection on absence, memory and reconciliation, In My Father’s Room is explored through the lens of its contemplative cinematic language, as Maha Harada transforms a deeply personal story of grief into a meditation on human connection and the possibility of healing.
Caught between barely containable nerves and a deep-seated admiration, I told the winning filmmaker, on the day my fellow FIPRESCI jury members, Loretta Gandolfi and Guillermo Courau, and I presented the Award at the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival, that her film mattered in these times precisely because it championed not only stillness and silence (without necessarily sounding reactionary), but also the importance of reconnecting with one’s roots and making peace with a seemingly lost past. In a year in which healing has emerged at the heart of a revolution (Mike Leigh’s latest film, Tender Loving Care, won the festival’s Concha de Oro, the main award), the FIPRESCI Award for Best Film went to In My Father’s Room (Muyou no hito, 2026), written and directed by Maha Harada, who drew inspiration from Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. The film also stands as an example of a form of resistance that has less to do with conflict — at least not with overt, physical confrontation — than with reconstruction, incantation, and possibility.
Absence and mourning have long been recurring themes in Japanese fiction, though by no means exclusive to it. It comes as little surprise, then, that this should also be a story of healing, in which the protagonist turns to the past to make sense of the present and fill the void left behind. Yet In My Father’s Room is more than a tale of overcoming loss. At its centre is the relationship between a middle-aged woman who works at an art museum — Harada herself has worked as a curator at contemporary art institutions — and the ghostly presence of her late father. Satomi, our intrepid explorer, ventures into a jungle of memories, summoning her father through an excavation of the past and an attempt to reconstruct their relationship, particularly during the final days of his life.
Harada’s approach is compelling. On the one hand, she draws on the formal conventions of contemplative Japanese cinema: medium shots, close-ups, almost fetishistic details, a slow, lingering pace, enveloping, almost hearth-like music, and a frontal approach to the gaze, as though the camera itself were intent on understanding and listening to its characters. On the other, she infuses these elements with a minimalism that deepens emotion through delicacy, while drawing on an evocative symbolic vocabulary: a painting by Mark Rothko, an ancestral tea ceremony, a key, and a room.
There is something else worth highlighting, among many other things: In My Father’s Room approaches loneliness and the marginalisation of otherness through beauty and poetry, if indeed the two are not one and the same. Father and daughter are bound together by their shared experience of marginality: both have been cast aside by a society that punishes difference and extinguishes those who shine with a light of their own. In this respect, the film’s use of space is crucial: an empty city, a silent museum, a peaceful and harmonious home, an antique shop. These places become spaces of refuge, havens of empathy that embrace the characters and offer them a sense of solace through their very surroundings. Far from falling into the trap of emotional manipulation, the film neither dwells on tragedy nor resorts to easy melodrama. Instead, it explores the tension between two dimensions: conformity and difference, the living and the dead.
One final curiosity, in fact twofold, deserves mention. Harada makes her feature debut at the age of sixty-four — an unusual occurrence that makes her something of a rara avis, bringing to the screen a deeply committed portrait of singular human beings. At the same time, she does so by adapting a text of her own, written fifteen years earlier. This process of self-adaptation entails a further transmutation of the artistic work itself, as it moves from the strictly literary realm into an audiovisual language through which absence can be given form — or at least an attempt can be made to do so. Once again, two worlds converge.
Agus Izquierdo
© FIPRESCI 2026