Yanbaru

Getting out is not the same as going home.

Shot down over Okinawa in 1945, Lieutenant William Cooper and his Marines enter a forest where the past has a way of stepping into their path.

Enter the story

Okinawa · 1945War / Supernatural / DramaConcept artwork

01 / The story

The forest knows what they brought with them.

Cut off from their mission, Cooper and his squad have to cross the Yanbaru forest to survive. Its paths lead to places that should not be there. A memory can unfold in front of them; a familiar room can appear among the trees. What each man sees is his own.

Cooper keeps a bundle of letters from his wife, Betty, close to his chest. The men face a wilderness that turns their histories into something they can touch. For Cooper, finding a way home means reckoning with what home has become.

02 / The letters

Home has a sound.

Betty writes about the house they bought, Winston the dog, a blue dress she misses wearing, and a screen door that refuses to stop squeaking. She jokes. She gets exasperated. Her world goes on while Cooper is away.

Those small, imperfect details give the film another place to live. They are what Cooper carries through the dark.

We’ll be waiting for you... and so will the screen door.
Betty, in a letter to WilliamSqueeeekclack.

A woman in a blue dress stands among moonlit trees

Concept artwork

03 / The visions

The past walks out to meet them.

The forest can make a memory physical. A doorway opens where there should be trees. Familiar faces appear at impossible distances. Some visions are brutal; others offer a moment of light.

Yanbaru moves between survival horror and the stubborn tenderness of the life Cooper is trying to reach. The wonder belongs beside the terror.

04 / The image

Only certain things keep their color.

The film was conceived in black and white, or so close to it that a retained color feels like an event. Betty’s blue dress can pass through the trees. A borrowed Zippo can warm a face for a second. A trace of red can interrupt the gray.

The selective color is part of the storytelling: fragments of love, life and violence that refuse to fade with the rest of the world.

Blue / BettyAmber / FireRed / Blood

A developed feature film

The story is already written.

Yanbaru has a completed feature screenplay and a substantial development history: visual materials, a scene-by-scene production breakdown, and location scouting with actors. It remains a film Luke intends to bring to the screen.

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