Alum Hiroshi Nakajima's Dystopian Dream in Cinema

THE JAPAN TIMES -- He has since made two features in the U.S.: “Lily,” a semi-autobiographical drama about a young scriptwriter’s professional and romantic dilemmas, released in Japan in 2011; and now, “The Secret Children,” a sci-fi drama based on Nakajima’s screenplay about a near-future society in which a new government decides to eliminate thousands of human clones produced under a previous regime. Dreaming of making films abroad, Nakajima went to high school in New Zealand to improve his English and, after graduating, entered a junior college in California as a film student. He later transferred to San Francisco State University, where he received his degree in 2003. “I didn’t want to study film in Los Angeles because everybody does that and I didn’t want to be like anyone else,” he says with a not-entirely-ironic grin. The thought of returning to Japan to start his career also didn’t appeal to him.