I Was a Simple Man is an American family drama film written and directed by Christopher Makoto Yogi.[3] The film stars Steve Iwamoto, Constance Wu, Tim Chiou and Kanoa Goo.[1]
The film has its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 29, 2021, and received a limited theatrical release in the United States on November 19, 2021, by Strand Releasing.[1]
Plot
As a family in Hawai'i faces the imminent death of their eldest, the ghosts of the past haunt the countryside.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of 24 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.00/10. The website's consensus reads: "I Was a Simple Man tells a simple story whose deceptively straightforward approach yields richly melancholic rewards."[9]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 83 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". It was named the fourth best film of 2021 in the New Yorker Magazine, where film critic Richard Brody called it "one of the great films about death."[10] Roxana Hadadi wrote on RogerEbert.com that the film is a "100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure",[11] while David Ehrlich of IndieWire called it "masterful" and dubbed it a "Critics Pick".[12]
