(L-R) Makoto Nagahisa and Nana Mori attend the BURN premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at Library Center Theatre on January 25, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Sundance Film Festival)
By Erik Adams
Makoto Nagahisa brings the heat to the NEXT section of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. And that heat comes with a disclaimer.
“A brief warning,” he tells the Library Center Theatre prior to the premiere of BURN. “This is an intense, raw film dealing with violence, drugs, and sexuality. But the emotions at its core are what I want young people to see and feel the most.”
That’s no understatement. The life and times of young Ju-Ju (Nana Mori) contain some of the most in-your-face and upsetting imagery you’re likely to see at the Festival this year. Her father and mother are abusive tyrants, cruelly intolerant of her vocal stutter. Running away from home to join the street kids who live in the neon-lit open-air spaces of Shinjuku City in Tokyo, she falls easily into their rituals and games — and goes too hard on their drug of choice: Milk laced with sleeping pills. There’s suicide, there’s sex work, and, as the title implies, there’s fire.
But there’s also those big, teenage emotions. In a cinematic language all his own, Nagahisa heightens Ju-Ju’s reality enough to make any adult viewer remember what it felt like to want true independence, or to belong. The camera is placed low to the ground, to replicate a kid’s perspective. Onscreen graphics take on the stroke and hue of the glitter gel pens favored by Ju-Ju’s new friends. Bad memories and revenge fantasies are rendered in choppy, lo-res computer graphics.
“In my eyes, sometimes reality is a bit too detailed,” Nagahisa says in the post-premiere Q&A. “And so, sometimes I see reality the way it’s portrayed in CG sequences. And then specifically, there’s this smartphone app where reality gets turned down into low-definition and you get that kind of look.”
Smartphones are hugely important to the kids of BURN. It’s how they keep track of one another, arrange appointments with johns, or trade the multipurpose flame sticker that acts as a secret handshake within their ranks. Nagahisa brings older generations of technology into the mix as well, introducing characters in analog snapshots and shooting some scenes on videotape, or with a CCTV camera.
They’re all tools for communication — something Ju-Ju struggles with on her own.
“She has a lot to say, and she really wants to say a lot of things about the world, but she doesn’t manage to,” Nagahisa says. In voiceover, Mori delivers her lines without the stutter because of “the difference between what’s inside [Ju-Ju] and what she manages to express.”
According to Nagahisa, the Japanese press villainizes the kids of Shinjuku — they’re portrayed as dangerous, or mentally ill. BURN is intended to dispel that image, and its director interviewed several kids living on the streets in preparation for the movie. Mori made an effort to get closer to the characters, too, living near the setting of the movie and cutting back on her skincare routine and reducing her toiletries to a toothbrush and nail clippers.
With the camera low to the ground, Nagahisa found it easier to see things that, like Ju-Ju and her friends, some people might step right over without a second thought.
“We were very good at finding all this glitter and all the beautiful things inside asphalt,” he says. “So I thought that one of the questions of the film would be to show as much glitter on the asphalt as possible.”
