As a Japanese filmmaker working across cultures, HIKARI has developed a cinematic style attentive to the fragile spaces that open up between people.
Born Miyazaki Mitsuyo, she adopted her professional name HIKARI early in her directing career drawn to its bright meaning of ‘light’ and partly to make it easier to remember as her work began to circulate internationally. Her films focus on individuals navigating their search for connection, autonomy and belonging within social and emotional constraints. Without being tied to a specific cinematic tradition, HIKARI’s films draw heavily on lived experience and work across different disciplines, allowing her to observe human relationships with patience and giving space for emotional complexity.
Rental Family, her 2026 comedy-drama starring Yamamoto Mari and Brendan Fraser, explores how human connection can emerge in unexpected ways. The story follows relationships that start as practical arrangements of hired actors fulfilling temporary roles as friends or family members, but which gradually uncover the deeper emotional needs and vulnerabilities of those involved.
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The concept behind Rental Family
The idea for the film came through a chance discovery: while researching job opportunities for foreigners in Japan, HIKARI came across the existence of so-called “rental family” services. A particular story about a man on his deathbed who hired a woman to play the role of his estranged daughter (someone he had long hoped to apologise to), stayed with HIKARI for the emotional truth that emerged through the encounter rather than for the fictional nature of it. She realized there was something ‘unexpectedly peaceful in the act itself: the simple presence of another person, the willingness to listen, and the emotional truth that emerged despite the fiction’, as well as in the possibility of release that such an exchange could offer. It suggested that regret, something all people carry, can sometimes find expression in the most unlikely circumstances.
This curiosity led her to look more closely at why such services exist in Japan and what emotional needs they respond to. ‘As I continued my research, I began to see a paradox: in one of the most technologically advanced, efficient, and convenient cities in the world, isolation and loneliness had become almost unavoidable,’ HIKARI reflects. At the same time, she noticed access to talking therapy can remain limited because of cost, stigma or emotional barriers. Within this context, rental family services begin to make sense not as replacements for genuine relationships, but as discreet and informal responses to gaps that society does not always know how to address.
In recent years, this phenomenon has captured the attention of many writers and filmmakers (one notable example being Werner Herzog’s 2019 drama Family Romance, LLC), but HIKARI’s take on the subject matter is marked by a quiet focus on the moments of understanding, rather than on the transactional aspects of these agreements.
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Beyond the fundamental need for connection, the core concept of Rental Family is shaped by the possibility of requesting someone to temporarily perform a role in one’s life, becoming exactly who is needed in a particular moment. For HIKARI, this tension between performance and authenticity opens up broader reflections on ‘identity, performance, healing and the desire to feel seen’. The film openly approaches these questions, allowing space for contradiction and ambiguity, and observing how sincere emotions can surface even within carefully constructed situations.
Cinema as observation
When reflecting on the filmmakers who have shaped her way of thinking about cinema, HIKARI points to a diverse range of directors whose work differs widely in tone and style. From Miyazaki Hayao and Itami Jūzō to Michael Haneke, Jacques Tati and Steven Spielberg, these figures are linked, in her view, less by genre or aesthetic than by a shared attention to human behaviour under pressure. Across vastly different cinematic languages, their films observe how individuals respond to social, emotional or systemic forces in the world they inhabit. For HIKARI, this approach to cinema as a means of close observation has been more formative than any particular tradition or school, and she describes herself as ‘not someone formed by strict lineage, but as a kind of pioneer who is shaped by experience, intuition, and trust in the emotional truth of the moment.’
Her understanding of cinema developed gradually through her work as a singer, stage performer, costume designer, artist and photographer, before converging in filmmaking as sōgō geijutsu: a comprehensive art form in which multiple disciplines meet. Her creative decisions (camera placement, lens selection, focal length) are guided less by theory than by what feels emotionally right in the moment, with attention focused on presence and responsiveness rather than pre-defined rules.
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Finding belonging between cultures
That intuitive way of working was strongly influenced by her experience of moving between Japan and the United States. Arriving in Utah as a teenager, she found herself the only Asian student in the room, speaking little English and often feeling invisible. Over time, friendships formed through patience, listening and mutual curiosity, rewriting her understanding of family as something defined not by blood but by empathy and care.
At the same time, societal expectations around behaviour, particularly for women, were deeply rooted and quietly enforced in Japan, where HIKARI grew up. From an early age, she became aware of how these unspoken rules shaped the ways people expressed themselves through their lives. The strength and resilience she observed in the women around her, including her mother and grandmother, coexisted with the reality of having to fight to be seen and treated as equals.
These realisations, together with the hardships and dislocations of her younger years, came to feel like essential steps in a longer journey to the compassionate understanding of humanity which would later find its way into her cinematic production.
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Drawing in part from her own experience of feeling like both an outsider and insider at once, the choice of telling the story in Rental Family through the eyes of a middle-aged white man allows the film to approach questions of difference, belonging and connection from an oblique angle.
For her, Rental Family is less about offering answers than about encouraging attention to emotional experience, inviting audiences, as she puts it, to ‘allow yourself to embrace’ whatever feelings emerge: ‘sadness, happiness, gratitude, or anything in between.’ She speaks of the importance of acknowledging those reactions, and of recognizing that moments of discomfort or vulnerability need not be faced in isolation.
Thinking about her own journey, HIKARI understands filmmaking as a process that is demanding and sustained through persistence more than certainty. Her experience has reinforced the value of collaboration, mutual care and trust, particularly for women and for those navigating unfamiliar cultural or professional environments. By emphasising the importance of believing in one’s own voice and finding support in the people who walk alongside you, HIKARI aims to create spaces where mutual vulnerability can become, however briefly, a place of recognition through her cinema.
Rental Family was released on 16 January 2026 in the UK and will be available to stream on Disney+ soon.
About HIKARI
Originally from Osaka, HIKARI is a writer, director and producer working between Japan and the United States. Her short film Tsuyako (2011), made as a USC thesis project, screened at over 100 international film festivals and received more than 50 awards, including the Directors Guild of America Student Award for Best Female Filmmaker. In 2013, she wrote and directed A Better Tomorrow for the inaugural Lexus Short Films programme. Her subsequent work includes short films, commercials and branded projects. HIKARI developed the script for her debut feature 37 Seconds through the Sundance Institute/NHK Screenwriting Workshop and Film Independent labs. The film premiered at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.