I Was a Simple Man

I Was a Simple Man is an American family drama film written and directed by Christopher Makoto Yogi. The film stars Steve Iwamoto, Constance Wu, Tim Chiou and Kanoa Goo.

The film has its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 29, 2021, and received a limited theatrical release in the United States on November 19, 2021, by Strand Releasing.

Plot

As a family in Hawai'i faces the imminent death of their eldest, the ghosts of the past haunt the countryside.

Cast

The cast includes:

• Steve Iwamoto as Masao Matsuyoshi
• Constance Wu as Grace
• Tim Chiou as Adult Masao
• Kanoa Goo as Gavin
• Chanel Akiko Hirai as Kati
• Nelson Lee as Mark
• Hau'oli Carr as Ashley
• Kyle Kosaki as Young Masao
• Boonyanudh Jiyarom as Young Grace

Reception

The film won the Grand Jury Award at the San Diego Asian Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Made in Hawai‘i Award at the Hawai‘i International Film Festival.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of 24 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.00/10. The website's consensus reads: "I Was a Simple Man tells a simple story whose deceptively straightforward approach yields richly melancholic rewards." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 83 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". It was named the fourth best film of 2021 in the New Yorker Magazine, where film critic Richard Brody called it "one of the great films about death." Roxana Hadadi wrote on RogerEbert.com that the film is a "100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure", while David Ehrlich of IndieWire called it "masterful" and dubbed it a "Critics Pick".

References

External links

• I Was a Simple Man at IMDb
• I Was a Simple Man at Rotten Tomatoes

1. Simple Man
2. Of a Simple Man
3. I Am a Simple Man
4. A Simple Favor (film)
5. Simple Gifts
6. A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)
7. Ricky Van Shelton
8. Simple Minds
9. If You Were a Woman (And I Was a Man)
10. A Simple Plan (film)
11. 2021 Sundance Film Festival
12. Man! I Feel Like a Woman!
13. Blood Simple
14. Wojak
15. Simple Man (Charlie Daniels song)
16. Man of Simple Pleasures
17. A Simple Investigation
18. Backroads (album)
19. Songs for Beginners
20. Future tense