Director: Michihito Fujii
By the time she realizes she is dead, the mother searching for her missing son has already crossed into a world reserved for restless spirits.
What is The Parades about?
The Parades follows a mother whose search for her son takes on new stakes once she understands that she herself did not survive the disaster that separated them. Trapped among a group of spirits who share her in-between state, she has to learn the rules of this new realm while still holding onto the one thing that mattered before she died, finding her boy. As she bonds with the other lost souls around her, each carrying an unfinished piece of their own life, the film turns into a meditation on grief, memory, and the things people leave undone.
Cast & crew
Masami Nagasawa carries the film as the mother anchoring its emotional center, with Kentaro Sakaguchi, Ryusei Yokohama, and Nana Mori playing the other spirits she comes to know along the way. Tetsushi Tanaka, Shinobu Terajima, Lily Franky, and Akari Takaishi round out a cast built to give each spirit's backstory its own weight, so the film never treats them as mere plot devices.
Context & significance
Director Michihito Fujii builds the story around a quiet, almost restrained tone rather than conventional scares, using the premise less as horror and more as a way to sit with loss. At a run time of over two hours, the film gives itself room to move slowly through its ensemble of spirits before circling back to the mother's search.
Where & how to watch
The Parades is available on K-Time with a free account login, dubbed in Persian and with Persian subtitles for viewers who prefer to watch in the original Japanese. The platform's Farsi interface is built for Persian-speaking households looking for a quieter, character-driven film like this one.