FIREFLY DREAMS - DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

A few years after coming to Japan, I was asked to give some advice to a pretty but extremely rebellious high school girl who was giving her parents hell. I had a lot of sympathy for the girl, because she reminded me in many ways of my own teenage troubles. I forgot about her for a long time but years later I started to write a screenplay about a rebellious schoolgirl and I realised that this central character was modelled on her. That screenplay eventually became "Firefly Dreams".

I think that it is through the experience of trying to imaginatively enter the life of someone else that we come to understand ourselves. We see ourselves mirrored in other people and we come to understand our shared predicaments. In the film, Naomi becomes gradually curious about Mrs. Koide and her past. I wanted to capture the awakening of this curiosoty, the awakening of Naomi's capacity for empathy, which I think lies at the heart of all good films and all good fiction. I was interested in the idea that Mrs. Koide and Naomi were mirrors for each other.

While we were location hunting for the film, we discovered an abandoned farmhouse and in a junk-filled back room a dusty globe and a dusty mirror. When I saw the mirror and the globe, I feltas if I had stumbled onto an image that perfectly expressed the themes of the film. The globe for me represents the greater World and the desire to grow up, to escape, to be part of a larger and more exciting life. Both Naomi and Koide know this desire. The mirror represents self knowledge and that is what Naomi finds in Mrs Koide, and also what Mrs. Koide rediscover's through Naomi.

Another major element in the film is the countryside itself and the contrast of lifestyle there to that of modern urban Japan. While we were shooting the film I often thought about my childhood in Wales and the happy summer holidays I spent fishing in the river near my grandmother's house. Even though I now live on the other side of the globe I found numerous similarities to Wales in the Japanese countryside. I felt that I had come a long way but that I was in some strange way back where I had begun.