Director's Portrait: Naomi Kawase
Get to know one of the great humanists of Japanese cinema at this year’s festival.
Naomi Kawase is valued as one of the great humanists of Japanese cinema, on the same level as Hirokazu Koreeda (Shoplifters, Like Father, Like Son). She graduated from the Osaka School of Photography in 1989, and during the next few years she worked within the documentary genre, largely dealing with the trauma of being abandoned by her parents at a very young age. Kawase's approach to fiction is also heavily influenced by her documentary gaze. The documentary realism that characterizes her films is enhanced by the fact that she often uses amateur actors and serves as the starting point for stories of cultural status, alienation and the collapse of traditional family structures in contemporary Japan.
The major international breakthrough came with her first feature film Suzaku in 1997, for which she won, as the youngest director up until then, the Camera D'or Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then she has made a total of 32 films, many of which have premiered in Cannes.
When diving into Kawase's filmography, you will discover a unique sensitivity and an extraordinary ability to portray relationships between people. In Norway, she is best known for Sweet Bean (2015), which tells the story of the aging Tokue, who, with the help from her special pancake recipe, rescues a food stall run by the young chef Sentaro. Through emotional immersion and the focus on small, charming details, Kawase demonstrates an exceptional ability to capture both minor and major human drama. With her latest film True Mothers, it is obvious that Kawase is forging the ring when it comes to processing her own childhood trauma. Here, she lets us in on the emotional life and thoughts of a couple who want children, and a mother who abandons her child.