Critics Campus 2025 participant Fred Pryce speaks to Happyend director Neo Sora about the ills of capitalism, colonialism and surveillance, as well as the resistive power of more communitarian forms of living.

Happyend follows a group of teenagers navigating a dystopia. Do you think today’s culture takes the concerns of young people seriously?

Teenagers and young people are the moral compass of our time – like Greta Thunberg, or all the students who protest for Palestine. [Sora is wearing a “Free Palestine” T-shirt.] They’re trying to stop genocide and create a liveable future. They’re feeling the future pain the most acutely. So, in that sense, they’re the most serious people today, and the most unserious are the generations in power, who experienced the ignorant joys of capitalism.

Happyend came from re-examining my own youth. I feel extremely nostalgic for the blissful times that I spent in high school, just fucking around with my friends. For me, friendship is almost as sturdy and rock-solid as the Earth underneath us. But there are earthquakes that shake the foundations of your life and, for me, these friendships began to splinter because we had different political ideas. That’s the feeling I wanted to capture.

I noticed the teenage friends were very casually physically intimate.

That really comes from how I interacted with my friends. We were on top of each other all the time – for me, that touchy-feeliness is a mark of truly trusting each other. It was a really miraculous thing that these five kids really got along naturally. The actor that plays Yuta [Hayato Kurihara], for example, didn’t even have personal space. The thing I was most nervous about was whether or not they would feel like friends by the first shot. And they really became friends by then.

You grew up in both New York and Tokyo. Was there anything specifically ‘New York’ in the city portrayed in Happyend?

Some people think of the themes in the film as unrelated – surveillance, authoritarianism, coming of age, music. But, for me, it’s actually just one theme: colonialism. There was a big earthquake in 1923 that resulted in the genocide of Zainichi Koreans in Tokyo. Normal, everyday people went around murdering hundreds and hundreds of Korean people, Chinese people, even Japanese people who couldn’t speak the dialect. The colonial structures and resentments that made that happen are still around and being strengthened. The population is declining, so the government is faced with the dilemma of whether to allow non-Japanese people in. So I imagined a future where Japan starts to look a bit more like New York in its diversity.

Happyend

The surveillance technology depicted in the film reminded me of what’s been happening to the Palestine solidarity movement within institutions like the University of Melbourne, where I am now.

I started writing this film eight years ago, and at that time I could not have imagined how much further along we would be. What really inspired me was the William Gibson quote, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I was looking to different countries that were enacting what seemed, to me, like very high-tech dystopias and bringing it all into Japan. Already this year, they’re installing facial recognition for things like train passes. The difference is that it’s not novel anymore in the world of Happyend; it’s normal.

Do you think we’ve lost the ability to imagine alternate futures?

While writing Happyend I was reading Capitalist Realism, which has the quote, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” And it is extremely difficult. But there are micro-communities experimenting with alternate forms of communal living. I also think looking back into history gives us a lot of imagination. The anthropologist David Graeber looks at historical cases of people living without the authority of the nation-state.

Have you noticed any differences in how the film has been received in different countries?

In places like Hong Kong, where there have very recently been popular movements, the film was received tremendously well, to a degree that I could not have imagined. Especially in South Korea, because the timing was crazy. The film came out just after the popular uprising against their president, who was trying to use the same kind of emergency decree from the film. People said things like, “When I was in front of the presidential palace, someone literally came and gave me kimbap, so watching that scene made me cry.” There’s a familiarity with the emotions compared to Japan, where, unfortunately, popular movements aren’t as much of a thing. But people wearing keffiyehs would come up to me and be like, “This is my movie.”

Your point about micro-communities reminds me of how, in the film, music is used as a means of both connection and escape.

To me, techno shows can be micro-communities that engage in political ideas of being together – spaces that are queer-friendly, for example. The venues have to pay rent and DJs have to make a living, but they’re doing it for the community and the music. After the white flight in Detroit, these Black communities were left in a collapsing city, and were making music for each other’s joy. But techno has become the most commercial thing as well at certain festivals and venues, and knowing that there’s a genocide going on, partying feels completely icky. If it’s not intentional, it can be very escapist and apolitical. I present this almost like a false dichotomy: music or politics. But it should be both together.

What music have you been listening to recently?

I like Pinkpantheress. She makes me want to walk really fast.

Happyend screens on Friday 15, Thursday 21 and Sunday 24 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.

Read fellow Critics Campus participant Amelia Leonard’s feature on Happyend here.