The Resemblance

Back in 2018, I came across a New Yorker article entitled Japan’s Rent-A-Family Industry and became immediately fascinated by the concept of rental families. It’s a uniquely Asian phenomenon where people hire actors to role play and/or pose as relatives to either save face, heal, or rehearse troublesome situations to prepare themselves for the real-life incidents. I immediately thought it would make an interesting film and started jotting down ideas that might make a good script. The Resemblance was the result of years of sifting through many stories. But the story of an elderly couple wanting closure with their dead son held the most emotional resonance to me.

Many might find the concept of the film to be quite comic. However, my approach to writing and directing The Resemblance was naturalistic, intimate, and subtle. I chose not to ridicule the people who hire rental-families. Instead, I opted to examine why they emotionally need rental-families in the first place. I wrote this script as an examination of grief, longing, acceptance, and closure.

To convey this naturalistic approach, the visual language of the film primarily focuses on the characters. To create intimacy, we chose to use lots of close-ups and the camera focuses on small details in the characters’ behaviors. The production design is contemporary and urban, focusing on warm colors with a slight Asian sensibility. Framing will be influenced by the Asian aesthetic of balance and symmetry with clean lines and negative space.

Inclusion was a priority for us in hiring our cast and crew. 80.3% of our cast and crew identify as women, POC, and/or LGBTQIA+. 61% of our cast & crew were POC and 51% were women. A vast majority of our department heads were POC women. We had a total of 12 different API ethnicities in our cast and crew.