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Title: Daughters of Wars
Runtime: 6 min
Country: UK
Director: Sumiko Nakano
Placement: Award of Excellence
Competition: June, 2025
Synopsis: A cinematic short film inspired by the historical novel of the same name.
“They weren’t just women.
They were the Daughters of Wars.”
Japan. 1868.
The Tokugawa era is collapsing. The cherry blossoms fall as they always have—soft, silent, indifferent. But this time, they fall on steel. On betrayal. On civil war.
For over two centuries, the shogunate held Japan in rigid stillness. Then came the ships. The treaties. The rifles. And peace shattered from the inside.
Daughters of Wars is a cinematic interpretation—a visual monologue drawn from the world of the novel. It does not follow one battle or character. Instead, it gives voice to what history left behind: the unnamed, the unrecorded, the women who fought and burned in silence.
Set against the backdrop of the Boshin War, the film evokes the spirit of three fictional sisters from the novel: warriors shaped by fire, betrayal, and duty. Their faces are not preserved in scrolls. Their names are not etched in monuments. But they stood. They fought. And they endured.
This short is not a direct adaptation. It is an invocation.
A remembrance.
A reckoning.
A war cry for those erased.
Based on the novel Daughters of Wars by Sumiko Nakano.
This… is The Broken Oath.