I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn

Kenichi Ugana creates a fun and breezy celebration of all things moviemaking with I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn.

That’s why it wasn’t hard for me to be swayed by Kenichi Ugana’s I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: for 85 brief minutes, it reminds us just how incredibly transformative cinema can be, both as an art form and as a way of life. 

Seeing the love of genre cinema through Jack’s (Estevan Muñoz) eyes, Ugana crafts an efficient love story within the making of a low-budget ghost story, financed through a studio named “Crummy Entertainment” run by Rusty Festerson (played by genre legend Larry Fessenden). Jack has been wanting to make movies ever since he discovered the art form, knowing the joys it brought to his life since he was a child. And as the cameras were beginning to roll, their lead actor dropped out of the project, leaving them with few options to move forward.

Parallel to that story, rising Japanese star Shina (Ui Mihara) travels to New York City with her boyfriend and has lost all the passion she had for moviemaking. Her boyfriend dumps her and leaves her to fend for herself, which leads Shina to be stranded, with her luggage stolen and her wallet nowhere to be found. This is when she meets Jack, who proposes that she star in his movie and have a place to stay for a week, in the hopes that her life will be turned around enough. It’s a relatively simple story, and Ugana stays in that register for the next 85 minutes. 

While Jack and Shina don’t understand each other, she still agrees to star in his low-budget horror movie, where her conception of filmmaking completely changes, and she finds joy in making movies again. This is also where the audience will feel that same newfound appreciation for human-made creativity as Shina does, because Jack’s passion for moviemaking is so infectious that it’s enough to make anyone fall in love with the art of making cinema again. No matter how big or small a movie is, if there’s enough passion and inventiveness behind the camera, that’s all that matters, because it’ll translate on the screen. 

Ugana seems to understand this inextricable fact quite well, and transposes this idea in a relatively brisk rom-com that, while agreeable to watch, doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel. Sure, it’s fairly surprising to see Larry Fessenden appear in a bit part, alongside another genre cinema legend I won’t dare spoil in what is possibly the best post-credits scene ever made (no joke!), but it’s not a movie that’s as formally (and thematically) interesting as one of his last projects, The Gesuidouz. 

There is a desire to replicate the experience of a low-budget film as much as possible, with Ugana shooting these sections on Hi8 cameras, giving I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn a more textured, do-it-yourself vibe than some of Ugana’s other films. It makes the project feel more alive and compelling, especially during its climax, where Shina professes her love towards Jack within the artifice of the film they are making, as opposed to the 1.85:1 sections where we observe the characters developing a romance while they make their silly ghost story. 

The comedic beats work well because the alchemy between the two actors, no matter the language barrier that prevents them from fully communicating with each other, is rock-solid. Both Muñoz and Mihara have a palpable sense of play together that makes it easy for us to root for their eventual romantic bond, which is telegraphed from the start. I would’ve appreciated more scenes between the two that actively develop their shared love of cinema, beyond the repetitive sections where Jack professes his love for movies. However, the film still works well, as we immediately believe in their pairing and want them to rediscover the joys of making movies again. 

For Jack, it’s a passion that has unfortunately been weighed down by far too many setbacks. For Shina, it was once the career of a lifetime that has been plagued by one too many bad experiences. As they make a movie together, a small, independent feature that likely no one will see, they finally realize why they wanted to work in the industry in the first place and why movies, above all art forms, are the most creative, exhilarating, and life-affirming form of creation that exists on this planet. Without creativity, we’d be dead. And without movies, this society would not be worth living in. 

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn had its World Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival, in the Chevail Noir strand, on July 23, 2025.