Sara Minami is set for a busy few days in New York. The Japanese actress stars in two features selected for the 25th New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), where she will also receive the Screen International Rising Star Award.
“It’s a wonderful thing for a film to transcend borders and reach so many different places,” says Minami, who will introduce gold smugglers caper Magical Secret Tour on July 11 and teenage get-rich-quick drama All Greens on July 13.
“I’m looking forward to seeing how local people watch movies, what impressions they’ll have, what kind of reactions they’ll give us.”
They come nearly a decade since the 24-year-old made her film debut in 2017’s Dear Etranger, from director Yukiko Mishima, which premiered at Jeonju and secured her a best newcomer nomination at Japan’s Blue Ribbon Awards. A year later, she secured the prize for her lead role in 2018’s Shino Can’t Say Her Name, playing a high school girl with a stutter.
These early roles taught Minami an important lesson. “I didn’t need to ‘try’ to act,” she says. “That has really stayed with me and is something I still cherish to this day.”
That is not to say she goes into her work without preparation. “Whenever I have the chance to appear in a project, I always think ‘I wish I did this more this way’ or ‘I could have done it like this’. So when it comes to the next project, to learn from those feelings, I always try to expand my knowledge - whether through research or attending workshops,” she says.
There was no specific moment that drew Minami to performing. “Since I was little, I’ve just wanted to be an actor,” she recalls. “There were things about myself I didn’t like. I wanted to be someone else.” This impetus led her into modelling, which she continues to this day, represented by talent agency LesPros Entertainment.
This trajectory, which Minami agrees is different to how acting talent is often scouted in the West, has proven fruitful. A similar path was taken by one of Minami’s idols, Keiko Kitagawa, the prolific model-turned-actress whose credits range from Hollywood blockbuster The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift to Eiji Uchida’s acclaimed 2025 drama Night Flower.
“Kitagawa-san has been really kind to me,” says Minami. “I really respect her as a person and as an actor. I’d love to be like her.”
Since her debut, Minami’s roles have spanned genres, and her vivacity and chameleon-like look afford her a breadth of roles, from pregnant women to high school students. The former she plays in Chihiro Amano’s Magical Street Tour.
“It was a first for me, so I did a lot of research, [mostly] listening to stories from other people,” she says of the role, in which her character gets roped into a gold-smuggling operation. “It was an experience I’d never had before.”
All Greens is also tangentially about crime. She plays highschooler Boku Hidemi, who begins growing marijuana as a means to fund her rap career and get out of her dead-end town. “All Greens was such an energetic project,” she says. “During filming, the staff, the cast, every single person — you could really feel their love.”
The energy on set translates on screen. All Greens is as moving as it is funny, a coming-of-age story that challenges audiences until the last second. “It was a project that made me truly feel that making movies and acting is fun.”
“I tried my hand at voice acting,” Minami says of upcoming animated anthology film Grotesqqque, set for release in November, in which she plays one of the leads, Stella.
Looking ahead, she has several projects in the pipeline, all of which remain under wraps.
“I like challenging myself with things I’ve never done,” says Minami. “I’ve never done comedy, and I’d like to do a proper action movie.”
She would also love to appear in non-Japanese films. “Of course, there’s the language barrier and there are many things I’d have to study,” she adds. “But if I’m given the opportunity, I would love to take on that challenge,” she says.
NYAFF runs July 10-26.
This interview was conducted in Japanese and translated into English.
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