Zellner Bros’ ‘Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’ Getting a 2024 Re-Release

Zellner Bros’ ‘Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’ Getting a 2024 Re-Release

by Alex Billington
March 1, 2024
Source: YouTube

“Not fake, it’s real!” Bleecker Street has revealed a brand new trailer for a 2024 re-release of a lost indie cult classic called Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. The film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival as the latest Zellner Brothers creation, their fifth feature film at the time after Kid-Thing in 2012. It played at tons of fests, became a cult hit, but barely got a proper release and hasn’t been available to watch on VOD for a while. In honor of the film’s 10th anniversary, and with the wild return of the Zellner Brothers glorious Sasquatch Sunset this year, it’s landing in theaters again in March before the Sasquatches arrive in April. Rinko Kikuchi stars as Kumiko, a jaded Japanese office worker who discovers a hidden copy of Fargo (1996) on VHS, believing it to be a treasure map indicating the location of a large case of money. She travels to America in search of the loot and gets lost wandering around North Dakota. We covered the film 10 years ago (first look and trailers) and it’s good to see this revival. Absolutely worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.

New 2024 trailer (+ poster art) for the Zellner Brothers’ Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, from YouTube:

Here’s two original 2014 trailers for the Zellner Brothers’ Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, on YouTube:

The Zellner Brothers’ Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter follows a Tokyo office worker (Rinko Kikuchi) after she finds a battered VHS tape of a fictional film and becomes convinced the movie’s lost satchel of money is real. Believing she solved the mystery of the buried fortune, she abandons everything and embarks on a quest to frozen Minnesota in search of the mythical treasure, discovering the line between reality and fantasy may be even harder to locate. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is directed by the American indie filmmaker David Zellner, also creator of the indie films Plastic Utopia, Frontier, Goliath, Kid-Thing, and Damsel previously, plus this year’s Sasquatch Sunset. The screenplay is written by both David Zellner and Nathan Zellner (aka the Zellner Brothers). Produced by Andrew Banks, Jim Burke, Cameron Lamb, Chris Ohlson, and Nathan Zellner. This initially premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival years ago. It played at many, many film festivals around the world and first opened in limited release in early 2015. Bleecker Street will re-release Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter in select US theaters starting on March 22nd, 2024.

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