Aide aux Cinémas du monde - Plan 75 by Chie Hayakawa

In her devastating feature début, presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, Japanese director Chie Hayakawa imagines a Japan of the near future, where the elderly are offered euthanasia to limit public spending. Michi, a candidate for the 75 plan, Hiromu, a government recruiter, and Maria, a young Filipino care worker, find themselves united in a deadly pact. 

Born in Tokyo, Chie Hayakawa studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her short films Identify This Girl (2000) and Photography of Zero (2003) were included in an exhibition at the SVA Gallery in New York. What You Are Holding is Not an Apple (2000) and Vajra/Vajra (2001) were selected for the International Film and Technology Festival for two consecutive years and screened in Los Angeles, London and Toronto. She directed two other short films, Niagara (2013) and one of the segments of Anticipation Japan (2018), where 5 directors imagined Japan in 10 years.

After having put aside her desire for a feature film for a long time, the filmmaker embarked on the Plan 75 project. It came to fruition in 2022, at the 75th edition of the Cannes Festival, where the director saw her first film nominated in the Un Certain Regard section and receive the Special Mention. 

Chie Hayakawa, director of Plan 75: "I wanted to denounce the lack of empathy in Japanese society."

Her first feature film, presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 in the "Un Certain Regard" section, depicts Japan in the near future, where the elderly are offered euthanasia to limit public spending.

The writer-director seeks to depict an insult to human dignity, linking the primordial aspect of productivity and the company that recycles the bodies of the elderly.

The Plan 75 employees are characters with polite and kind faces, the director presents a gentle violence. Through choosing to depict this world where Japanese people have "stopped thinking", the director emphasises the dangers of this plan, accepted by all without question, with a bitter sweetness.

The opening of the film is a violent reminder of the Sagamihara massacre in 2016 when 19 residents of a home for the disabled were brutally murdered by a young Japanese man who wanted to rid Japan of "useless" people. This tragedy highlights the existence of a climate of intolerance towards the socially weak in Japan. Chie Hayakawa relates her film to modern Japanese society, "Plan 75 does not exist in reality, but everything described in the film does."

By projecting her fiction into the near future, she leaves a threat, the idea that a Plan 75 could really happen.