I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn had its world premiere on July 23 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Shina Mizuhara (Ui Mihara) is a bored actress. Promoting her new film, she lazily answers softball press questions. When she doesn’t get anything satisfying out of the interview, she turns to the camera and starts drooling. Completely unmotivated, Shina strives for a change of pace by vacationing in New York City.

Jack (Estevan Munoz) is an imaginative and passionate wannabe filmmaker. Growing up on Nirvana, George Romero, and Takashi Miike, Jack wants nothing more than to bring a punk rock ethos to film. Instead, he is a lowly intern for a New York studio, slaving away while only getting slightly closer to his dream.

When Shina and Jack get drunk at the same dive bar (and Jack finds Shina outside lying in someone else’s puke), an unlikely creative collaboration begins. Jack doesn’t have any knowledge of Shina’s celebrity overseas. Shina finds the DIY quality of the micro-budget film production a refreshing respite from the glitzy life she ran away from.

Ken’ichi Ugana’s I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn manages to capture some of the difficulties of the movie business without abandoning the charm of independent filmmaking. That said, the plot is light on conflict and not particularly dense. It is a straightforward romantic comedy built inside of a “love letter to the movies” conceit. The leads are fun, and the film-within-a-film is adequately quirky. But I don’t leave the film feeling wholly fulfilled by the realization of the natural conclusion. We know from moment one where the story is ultimately headed, and while the final images are gorgeously grand Guignol, the film struggles to build stakes along the way. Minor fault-lines cause razor thin cracks in the romantic pairing, and none of the drama is particularly engaging. The pair may be cute together, but it’s not enough to keep the film afloat.

It doesn’t help that none of the characters on the periphery of this romance have meaningful depth. They are all colorful personalities—most are used for comic relief—but they are mainly in the mix in order for the film-within-a-film to exist.

To provide a final nit-pick about this film, which is by and large a charming and airy romance, there is an ongoing thread of language barriers. However, the inconsistency of this bit of business actively hampers the development of the central romance. Shina and Jack can’t talk to each other, because Shina speaks Japanese and Jack speaks English. Early on, this is solved by a translator app, which seems to work just fine in allowing them to get to know each other. Often, however, the two don’t use the app and are talking past each other. Somehow, most of the time they understand the thrust of what the other means, even as they have no idea what is being said. This occurs between Shina and other characters, as well. And while, yes, this is a nit-pick criticism, it also is a problem that takes away from Shina’s major conflict in the first act of the film, which is that she is not just a fish out of water in New York City; she is stranded with no means of communicating with anyone. When people basically understand what she means without knowing her language, this lessens the dramatic currency of her situation.

Overall, Z-Grade Director is a light and lighthearted film that is difficult to dislike. By that same token, the lack of meaningful conflict or the heightening of stakes leaves something to be desired in the central relationship.

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: C+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)