Fantasia Fest 2026: You Are the Film Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Fantasia favorite Makoto Ueda has blessed the festival over the years with his time-travel writing, including Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes (2020), River (2023), and Rewrite (2025). This year, Ueda returns to the festival with his most uproariously creative concept yet in his directorial debut You Are the Film.  It follows scriptwriter Madoka (Ito) and musician Kazuma (Inowaki), who go to the theatre to watch a film individually, only to find out that they are inside each other’s films. Once confronted, they can communicate with each other through the screen to predict and alter the story.

Each with a film program in their hand, both Madoka and Kazuma help each other to solve their predicaments in comically quick fashion. Ueda transfers equal focus between them being the main characters of each other’s lives, as each of the two viewers use humorous benefit of their films’ sneaky cutaways to snitch on their supporting characters’ to break the dramatic tension with brilliant comedic relief. While audiences might expect that having the almighty answer sheet would render the film predictable, Ueda elevates the stakes in absurd fashion – making extraordinary use of this inspired idea over its compact 68-minute runtime.

Heightened by the outlandish genre-bending twists that are sure to hit viewers like a train – Madoka and Kazuma become more determined to alter their definitive stories, as Ueda finds ingeniously deliberate plot holes and rule-breaking story elements to save supporting characters from insurmountable circumstances. His frequent takes on time travel become versatile by the film’s use of timeline awareness, as a means to change time rather than travel to it. Made even more amusing by the dumbfounded reactions of Madoka and Kazuma’s friends, the unpredictability of events results in a riotous, cozy ride.

Overall, Makoto Ueda’s feature directorial debut, You Are the Film, is an outrageous, unpredictable tale that utilizes his brilliance in writing time travel to create a conceptually ambitious adventure within a concise 68-minute runtime. His alternating stories between Marika Ito’s Madoka and Kai Inowaki’s Kazuma, and his complexities in narrative rule-breaking, offer up an engaging, fresh take on time-altering storytelling.

still courtesy of Third Window Films

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Costa Christoulas

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