ソウジ・アライ
Soji ARAI
Actor / Producer / Filmmaker
Title
"Their Own Sake"
Format / Genre
- Format
- Feature Film | Inspired by a true story
- Genre
- Human Drama
Logline
A Japanese sake brewer seeking a place to belong ends up in his Navajo wife's desert hometown, where the water refuses him and the land is not the only thing that has run dry.
Concept
Set in the Arizona desert, Their Own Sake follows a Japanese sake brewer and his Navajo wife as they try to build a life together - and quietly lose themselves in the process. It is a human drama about belonging, family, and what love becomes when it is built on selves that have been abandoned. At its center is a question both intimate and universal: can a home exist when the people inside it have begun to disappear?
Profile
Soji Arai is a Japanese actor, producer, and filmmaker whose work spans film, television, theatre, and international co-production. Working as an actor under the name Soji Arai and as a producer under his birth name, Sohee Park, he has built a career across languages, cultures, and borders.
As an actor, he has collaborated with directors including Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Guan Hu, Takashi Miike, and Danielle Arbid. He stars in the Canal+ international drama series Singapura, scheduled for global release in 2026, and has also appeared in Apple TV+'s Pachinko and HBO's Tokyo Vice.
As a producer, Park develops projects through his Tokyo-based company Esquisse Films. His producing work includes Route 7 (2025), a Japan-Korea co-production that won the Audience Award at the Busan International Short Film Festival and was selected as a Market Pick at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival; The Penthouse, a feature psychological thriller co-produced between Malaysia, Kyrgyz Republic, and the United States; and Chihiro | Akemi, currently in post-production. He has also served as a juror for the Central Asian Competition at the Bishkek International Film Festival.
Their Own Sake marks a new step in his work: a project that brings together his experience as an actor, producer, and artist shaped between cultures. Rooted in questions of belonging, family, and the fragile distance between people, it reflects the international path he has built across borders and languages. He brings it to Cannes seeking the filmmakers who will help carry it into the world.