Yoshida Keisuke's Mentor Passes 1.5 Billion Yen Start and Wins Warsaw Asian Film Award
Yoshida's new film is outperforming his earlier features at the same point and has picked up a festival prize, which gives a director known for smaller dramas a wider commercial and international footing.
Reporting from 1 source: Cinema Today.
Keisuke Yoshida's film Mentor opened October 16 on 204 screens and drew 103,822 admissions with 161.64 million yen in ticket revenue over four days. Hayato Isomura and Seiya Suezawa star, with Go Ayano co-starring. The film also took the NETPAC Best Asian Film award at the 42nd Warsaw International Film Festival, where jurors cited its treatment of forgiveness.
The first-weekend figure for Mentor is 137 percent of the comparable three-day opening for Yoshida's Missing (which ended at 510 million yen) and 343 percent of Blank (180 million yen), per the same report. Theaters drew a broad crowd centered on people in their 20s and 30s. On the festival side, jurors at Warsaw framed the prize around the film's treatment of forgiveness. Yoshida's story follows two young men, played by Isomura and Suezawa, who reconnect with a man burned over his whole body in an apartment fire the pair caused fifteen years earlier as children. New stills from the release include a shot of Suezawa clinging to a traffic bollard, a beat Yoshida asked for by explaining that the pole is Takumi's mentor in that moment.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.