New movie "Hanamizuki"

Actress Aragaki Yui (21) is currently in New York to film for her new movie "Hanamizuki". In March she and costar Ikuta Toma (25) went to Hokkaido and finished all the domestic scenes for the movie. Now Gakky had to fly overseas by herself to film a couple more scenes in North America, but instead of feeling lonely she showed complete devotion.

The movie is based on Hitoto You's famous song "Hanamizuki" and filming already started back in September. Hanamizuki tells the story of a couple that has been in love with each other for more than 10 years despite all their discrepancies. It's a love story made by the team that already made movies such as "Koizora" and "Nada Soso". Aragaki plays the protagonist Sae who starts out as an ordinary high school girl and ends up being a successful career woman working overseas. She is going to transform from a young girl to an adult woman.

The scenes they are filming in New York right now show Sae, who just graduated from university, working as an editor and pursuing her dreams of become a successful woman overseas. It's an important step in her life as a person and as a woman in order to gain the experience money can't buy. Fortunately she has people around her that support her all the time. Aragaki has never been in New York before and was quite anxious about going overseas, but the atmosphere of Big Apple soon won her over.

She already started taking English lessons back when they were still filming in Japan. The pronunciation and all its nuances was the biggest challenge and she had to study it a lot in order to be able to make ordinary conversations without much of a dialect. It sure must have been very difficult for her, but director Doi Nobuhiro praised her English skills. "She did great and almost sounded like a native speaker in all the scenes with English lines! Soon it was more just about saying her next lines rather than being like 'now I have to speak English'," he said. Some of the extras that got to appear in the public scenes actually thought that she is a native speaker. How much more of a compliment can one get?

Once they've finished all the scenes in New York, they are going to move to Canada for the final scenes. Hanamizuki is planned to be finished filming by the end of June and will open in Japan on August 21.