21-year-old Kana (rising star Yuumi Kawai) works a disaffected job at a beauty salon, where she bristles against the beauty expectations placed on women her age. Her erratic mood and default to self-destruct impacts all of her relationships, as moments of levity erupt into violence and optimism simmers to despair. Bored with her slavish boyfriend, she finds another; the novel excitement of it all soon devolving into a volatile predicament. Uncommitted and trapped in her own life, Kana slowly makes her way towards the inner desert of her emotions. 

Alternating between claustrophobic blocking, ample zooms and expressive whip-pans brought together by dryly comedic editing and an intense actor’s direction, the sophomore effort from director Yoko Yamanaka (the youngest filmmaker to have a film selected at the Berlin International Film Festival with her 2017 debut Amiko) provides a frank and dynamic examination of womanhood and mental health in contemporary Japan. Inspired by the female protagonists of Yasuzo Masumura as much as the intense Cassavetes/Rowlands collaboration, Yamanaka breaks out with a work of stark confrontational honesty.

“Yoko Yamanaka's Desert of Namibia is profoundly affecting; imbued with a calm, introverted cruelty; like a girl without a home standing on any Tokyo street corner saying to the world, ‘I don't understand!’” – Lou Ye (Suzhou River)

“Elusive, Desert of Namibia is an ultra-melancholic slapstick comedy, a slow-burn vaudeville, a fantasy film without monsters or ghosts–or else entirely populated by monsters and ghosts, but with a seemingly everyday quality... About a generation's relationship to the world...” – Jean-Michel Frodon, Slate (France)

“Yuumi Kawai is immediately magnetic... Yamanaka’s work defies binaries… The film and its lead feel[s] pulsating alive.” – Siddhant Adhlaka, Variety

“Kawai’s masterful, multilayered performance, which presents Kana more as willful and lost than born bad and raised wrong, both exposes and humanizes her.” – Mark Schilling, Japan Times

“The messages here are klaxon-level clear. Japanese conformity is killing Kana and her generation as they twist themselves into shapes that don’t fit.” – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International