cinematography
Wataru Takahashi
editing
Keiko Okawa
Kohei Igarashi
Damien Manivel
music
Daigo Sakuragi
production design
Masato Nunobe
costumes
Kento Asai

cast
Hiroki Sano (Sano)
Yoshinori Miyata (Miyata)
Nairu Yamamoto (Nagi)
Hoang Nhu Quynh (Anh)

producers
Makoto Oki
Yusaku Emoto
co-producers
Martin Bertier
Damien Manivel
productions
MLD Films
Nobo

world sales
BAC Films International
sales@bacfilms.com
www.bacfilms.com

international press office
Brigitta Portier
brigittaportier@alibicommunications.be
www.alibicommunications.be

Accompanied by his friend Miyata, Sano returns to Izu, a seaside resort in Japan where he had fallen in love with his wife Nagi five years earlier.

2024 Super Happy Forever
2017 Takara, la nuit où j’ai nagé
(directed with Damien Manivel)
2014 Hold Your Breath Live a Lover
2014 House of Tofu (short)
2012 Marchen (short)
2011 Apartness (short)
2008 Voice of Rain That Comes at Night

“In 2018, during the winter when we released The Night I Swam, I received an email from Hiroki Sano and Yoshinori Miyata saying, ‘We’d like to make a film where we play our own characters.’ I didn’t know them at the time, but I was immediately interested. We met for the first time in 2019. I first asked them to write a plot and submit it to me, and then we started talking based on that material. The content of these exchanges is what forms the foundations of Super Happy Forever. Then Covid came along and fora while it was impossible to envisage anything. We keep working together. I would ask Sano and Miyata, for example, to tell me about their day-to-day lives and their recent experiences. Something else happened to me: in 2021, I lost a friend from high school. He was in his thirties, loved surfing and was in good health, but one morning he died suddenly. I was deeply shocked. I found it hard to accept, or maybe I didn’t really know what or how to think about his death. That’s the feeling I tried to express in the film.” (Kohei Igarashi)

Kohei Igarashi began making films at the age of eighteen, when he enrolled in Tokyo’s Zokei University. He studied under Nobuhiro Suwa. In 2008, his first feature film, Voice of Rain That Comes at Night, was screened at the Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival and won the Korean Critics Award. In 2011, he directed the short film Apartness. That same year, he enrolled in the film directing program at the Graduate School of Film and New Media in Tokyo University of the Arts, studying with Kiyoshi Kurosawa. There, he directed the short films Marchen (2012) and House of Tofu (2014). In 2014, his thesis film Hold Your Breath Like a Lover was selected for the 67th Locarno Film Festival. In 2017, he co-directed Takara, la nuit où j’ai nagé with Damien Manivel. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section and was also selected for the 65th San Sebastián Film Festival.