The curly perm Rinko Kikuchi wears in "Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!" didn't come from a mood board. It's the hairstyle Josef Kubota Wladyka's mother has worn for as long as he has known her.
"A lot of the decisions of the look of the character and everything was just based on my mom," Wladyka said during an international press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 14.
Wladyka, who wrote the film with Nicholas Huynh, calls it an homage to his mother. She is 82 and still ballroom dancing. Sony Pictures Classics released the film in theaters Sept. 25, eight months after it won the Directing Award in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival, where his mother drew a standing ovation at the premiere.
Kikuchi, an Oscar nominee for "Babel," plays Haru, a Tokyo ballroom competitor who pulls away from the world after losing her husband and dance partner, Luis (Alejandro Edda). Her friends drag her back to the studio, where a new instructor (Alberto Guerra) waits. The film moves between Japanese, English and Spanish, and between grief, comedy and something close to a ghost story.
Dancing her way into someone else's life
Wladyka handed Kikuchi photographs and video of his mother. What Kikuchi saw was a woman whose life was organized around the dance floor.
"She's been living her life through dance," Kikuchi said. "And so for me to create the character, I really had to get that dance, the ballroom dancing into my body and really live through it."
The cast had about four weeks of rehearsal, and Kikuchi started earlier because Haru carries the most routines. Two choreographers ran the floor: Miri, a professional ballroom dancer who connected the production to Tokyo's competitive scene, and Chikako, a modern dancer. Wladyka said ballroom splits into Latin and standard and spans 10 styles, so the team had to choose which dances the story could carry.
He also shot the opening ballroom sequence in the same legendary hall where Masayuki Suo filmed the 1996 Japanese hit "Shall We Dance?"
Kikuchi was firm about one thing. "Ha-Chan is not me. I am not Ha-Chan," she said, laughing that she isn't "quite out there like that."
Why the dance floor matters
Asked whether dance gives Japanese people permission to be messy, Wladyka declined to speak for a country and spoke for his mother instead.
"I think there's a lot of pressure as a Japanese woman to be very put together," he said. "I know for her that dancing is a way to just kind of let herself truly, truly express herself."
Kikuchi widened the frame. When Japanese dancers take up a form like tango, she said, they aren't only learning steps. They're tasting the culture that comes with it, and that makes it easier to be free.
That is the film's real thesis. Grief locks Haru inside her body, and the dance is how her body remembers it is still alive.
A Tokyo with salsa in it
Wladyka is half Japanese, the youngest of three boys raised by a single mother in the United States. He made his first feature in Colombia and has spent years shooting in Latin America, so he brought Latin American actors to Tokyo with him.
"A lot of the times we just kind of see stories of the all-American person in Japan," he said. "But there's people from Mexico, there's people from India."
The sharpest proof is a cameo. Orquesta de la Luz, the Japanese salsa band that stunned Latin audiences in the 1980s and '90s, appears in the film. Wladyka said he discovered the band in the aughts in salsa clubs in Cali, Colombia, where he was learning Spanish and trying to get his first film made. Rubén Blades, a friend from a television job, later told him how crowds reacted when the band first took the stage in New York: disbelief, then a packed floor.
"When they came out and played, it just rocked the place," Wladyka said, recounting Blades' story. He credited producer Mao Nagakura with reaching the band.
He also pointed to bachata's following in Japan and to Juan Luis Guerra's "Bachata en Fukuoka," which the Dominican star wrote after watching Japanese dancers move to his music.
For a reporter from the Dominican Republic who grew up wondering why Japanese musicians were playing salsa at all, Wladyka had an answer that doubles as the movie's argument: Dance crosses borders, and the people doing it don't need permission.
The Cranberries, rewound
Two of the film's biggest dance scenes play to The Cranberries, and Wladyka wrote both songs into the script. He said Japan sometimes feels like a time capsule of the late '90s and early 2000s, and while he wrote in Tokyo cafes, Dolores O'Riordan's voice kept drifting through the speakers.
"There's such emotion to it," he said of her voice. It "fit the tone of the film and the tone of what Ha-Chan was going through."
The records live on a wall in Haru and Luis's apartment, an eclectic collection that tells you who this couple was before the story starts. Wladyka's other touchstones include Claude Lelouch's "A Man and a Woman," one of his mother's favorites, and Andrew Haigh's "All of Us Strangers" for its ghosts. Posters for "Dirty Dancing," "All That Jazz" and "Punch-Drunk Love" hang in the film itself.
Three sisters, mostly unscripted
Kikuchi recommended YOU and Yoh Yoshida, who play Haru's sisters, and both agreed to read for the roles. YOU said she leaned into Hiromi's silliness so hard that Wladyka would ask, "Could you just play it normally, please?"
Yoshida said the chemistry was hardly acting. The three would chat between takes, and the cameras simply caught the conversation already in progress.
Kikuchi on Iñárritu
Twenty years after "Babel," Kikuchi admitted she has lost touch with director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. "It's kind of embarrassing," she said. The last time she heard from him was when she married, and he sent the couple a video letter "in his unique style."
The bigger reunion was on the dance floor. "Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!" is rated R and runs 2 hours, 2 minutes.
Quick answers
Is 'Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!' based on a true story? It's inspired by director Josef Kubota Wladyka's mother, who is 82 and still ballroom dancing. Rinko Kikuchi's character, Haru, wears the same curly perm his mother has always worn.
Who stars in 'Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!'? Rinko Kikuchi stars as Haru, with Alejandro Edda, Alberto Guerra, YOU, Yoh Yoshida and Damián Alcázar. Sony Pictures Classics released it in theaters Sept. 25, 2026.
What music is in 'Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!'? Two key dance scenes use songs by The Cranberries, and the Japanese salsa band Orquesta de la Luz appears in the film.
