Naomi Kawase

Series Site

"Naomi Kawase is among the most renowned contemporary Japanese filmmakers. She began making films in 1988, when she was 18 years old, and has been garnering awards for the intimate and timeless tenor of her work ever since. Her earliest films, shot in an experimental style on Super 8mm and 16mm film, had an autobiographical bent, focusing on her family life and finding the way to meet her own father (Embracing, 1992), or the loving but charged interactions with the foster mother who raised her (Katatsumori, 1994). While she continued to explore nonfiction, Kawase began developing fiction films, and in 1997 she released her debut dramatic feature, Suzaku. Focusing on the trials of a family living in a rural area of Japan in economic decline, the film won the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or—making Kawase the award’s youngest recipient at that time. Ten years later The Mourning Forest, her feature about the intertwined fates of a young woman and an older man, won the Cannes Grand Prix." —MoMA