André Hayato Saito is a Japanese-Brazilian screenwriter and director. Directing films for 21 years, he’s also a partner at the 2x Emmy award winner production company MyMama Entertainment. Since 2019, Saito has been working on a short film trilogy that embraces his Japanese-Brazilian roots and portrays themes like identity, cycles of life and death, and ancestrality. The first short film of the sequence was Kokoro to Kokoro, a short documentary selected for the 40th Uruguay Intl Film Festival, 24th Rio de Janeiro Intl Film Festival, Roma Short Film Festival (best short documentary), Tokyo Intl Short Film Festival (honorable mention) and 14th Hollywood Brazilian Film Festival, 2022. The second short film, Wind of Gold, a docufiction, came next and was just premiered at the 46th Moscow International Film Festival. And the third one, Amarela, the last short film of the sequence, is a fiction, and it competed for the Palme d’Or at the Official Short Film Competition at the 77th Festival de Cannes.
All these short films lead to his first fiction feature film entitled Yellow Chrysanthemum, which delves into the same themes and was selected for several labs and market events such as Torino Feature Lab 2024, Ontario Creates (IFF) 2022, TIFF Filmmaker Lab 2021, Shanghai Film Market 2021, Florianopolis Audiovisual Mercosul (FAM) 2021, and was a semifinalist at FRAPA 2021, a prestigious screenplay contest in Brazil.
Saito has been selected for other important labs like Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires 2022, Interaction: Doc Workshop 2023, and Playlab's Apichatpong immersion 2023. He was also invited to be one of the creative mentors of the "Amplifica Cine" program, which empowers 10 promising young filmmakers from the Sao Paulo outskirts.In 2021, he ministered directing classes together with Cesar Nery, his business partner since 2003, at the Beijing Film Academy. They wrote and directed short films that were selected for several film festivals around the globe, like Biarritz Film Festival, New York City Film Festival (winning Best Original Storyline with "Tom Sadly"), Moscow International Film Festival, and Festival Cinélatino in Toulouse.
Festival de Cannes
