6th Okinawa International Movie Festival

The cast of “Wa Da Ichi Gou,” by Lester Shin and Scott Lin, gathered for a cast greeting before the movie screening today. The film is a multi-country collaboration work, developed with Japanese and Hong Kong moviemakers, while the staff is mostly from Taiwan.

 

The lead actress in the film Naomi Watanabe, has roots in Taiwan herself, as her mother was born there. She plays Miko Wada, a tenth generation master of “Wadaya,” a confectionary store with 300 years of history. She asks Daiten (played by Aaron Yan) for his hand in a fake marriage to secure the lineage of the store, but only in return for giving up the secret recipe of the sweet maker.

The romantic comedy also stars Wong Cho Lam, a singer-songwriter and MC from Hong Kong, who commented at the cast greeting: “I had an image of Hawaii of Okinawa, but when I arrived there was a storm, so I was surprised, and wasn’t sure if I could go to the beach!”

The multi-national cast on stage included actress Reina Ikehata, who spoke of how she is often mistaken as Taiwanese. Ikehata has recently become active across Asia, having lived in Taiwan where she studied Chinese.