To Mom, With Love

Part of The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025

Japanese title: お母さんが一緒 (Okasan ga issho)


Three sisters gather at a hot spring resort to celebrate their mother’s birthday. Yayoi, the bossy eldest sister, is a successful career woman with a brilliant academic mind, but at 40 she’s still unmarried. The middle sister Manami is the beauty of the three but has a reputation for quick job turnovers and disastrous relationships with questionable choices of men. And the youngest sister Kiyomi, 29 and still living at home with mum, is desperate to get away from her family’s constant negativity.

Kiyomi concocts a plan to escape via local man Takahiro, by declaring him her fiancé at her mother’s birthday dinner. But it won’t go smoothly – each sister believes her idea for celebrating their mother’s birthday is the right one, and their ill-fated gathering turns to chaos when their criticism toward one another escalates.

A high-velocity screwball comedy with genuine emotional underpinning, To Mom, With Love is director HASHIGUCHI Ryosuke’s (Three Stories of Love, JFTFP19; All Around Us, JFTFP12) loving contribution to the Japanese “home drama” genre, and a portrait of a dysfunctional family and sibling rivalry that many will relate to.#

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