MOONGIRL — A film by Victor Boccard

Two figures walking through a snowy tunnel

Toronto International Film Festival 2026 Official Selection

World Premiere · TIFF 2026

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“Stories do not merely reflect reality — they create it.”

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01 / Origins

A story between France and Japan

MOONGIRL was born from an encounter between two worlds. Inspired by The Tale of the Princess Kaguya — one of Japan’s oldest and most enduring folktales — and French poet Victor Hugo’s Demain, dès l’aube, written in 1847.

Developed between Paris and Tokyo, the film draws equally from Japanese mythology and European romanticism. Its emotional foundation lies in a simple question:

How do we find beauty inside unbearable sadness?

Blending memory, grief and artistic creation, MOONGIRL explores the stories we tell to survive loss — and how those stories, in turn, shape our lives.

02 / About the film

Logline

In the snow, a writer tells a young man a story. By the time she finishes, it’s true — and it becomes his life’s work.

Synopsis

One summer, an old painter leaves his seaside home on a final journey. Years earlier, in a snowy wilderness, he existed only as the character of a story discussed by a young writer and an aspiring painter. As fiction and reality merge, the story begins to shape their lives. Now old, the painter returns to where that conversation took place.

Runtime: 20 minutes
Format: Shot on 16mm
Sound: 5.1 Mix
Country: Japan / France
Language: Japanese
Premiere: TIFF 2026 · World Premiere

A young man and woman together in the snow

03 / Director’s note

“Life goes on, and it must. Where there is life, there is hope.”

Every film I make is haunted by a very personal obsession: life goes on, and it must. Even when the material is dark or sad, I think of myself as a deeply optimistic person. No matter what happens to us, the one thing we owe ourselves is to keep living. Because life is infinitely precious.

And so the question at the heart of MOONGIRL is: How do we find beauty inside unbearable sadness? How can the loss of a loved one become not only a wound, but a source of inspiration, even wonder?

04 / Director

Victor Boccard

Victor Boccard is a film director from France. Born in Paris, he took his first steps in the film industry as a performing actor before evolving into directing. A graduate of the famed Cours Florent and Paris film school “ESRA”, he has directed several short films since 2019, mainly produced through his own production company, Atta Films. He directs commercial work in parallel, to fund fiction projects and retain creative independence.

Now a hyphen between Paris and Tokyo, Boccard’s cinema draws from both worlds. Through fiction and visual storytelling, he explores cultural distance, intimacy, and identity, in search of a universal emotional language.

05 / Cast