Naomi Kawase
From a vast record of 750 days, 5000 hours, Official Film of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 SIDE A and SIDE B are the official documentaries by Naomi Kawase capturing not only the athletes gathered from all over the world, but also their families, people involved in the Games, volunteers, medical personnel, and protesters shouting for the cancellation of the Olympics.
Through this short film directed by Naomi Kawase you will witness the expressiveness of students and interviews with educators from Waldorf school’s throughout Japan.
A "movie" that is a mirror of the times. At the forefront of the movie, there are "important things" to know now ... Kento Nakajima learns about such "movie now" through interviews and on-site interviews.
After finding out how many people are left on Earth, a boy in Japan begins to contemplate how precious life truly is.
After a long and unsuccessful struggle to get pregnant, convinced by the discourse of an adoption association, Satoko and her husband decide to adopt a baby boy. A few years later, their parenthood is shaken by a threatening unknown girl, Hikari, who pretends to be the child's biological mother. Satoko decides to confront Hikari directly.
A young bioarchaeologist Yukisuke is attracted to a girl Koyomi, who runs a small stand of taiyaki pastry that he often buys. Koyomi is hospitalized, however, by a car accident on a rainy day after they go out together, and wakes up with short term memory loss, where she cannot remember anything beyond the present day. Yukisuke tries to live close to her as before but the lack of collective memory starts to stagger him.
In the form of a fiction, Naomi Kawase delivers a self-portrait which is also a re-crossing of her earlier films. The old city of Nara, the first capital of Japan where Naomi Kawase is from and where she still lives, opens up a reverie where past, present and future meet. In its winding streets mingle the "Haré" of days of celebration and ceremony and the "Ké" of everyday life.
Toru revisits the astronomical observatory in his old school for the first time in 15 years. He finds a notebook in the room that remained unchanged and frozen in time. "Thanks for watching me." It was a message from Shinya, a member of the school dance club, who he had feelings for.
Naomi Kawase describes Sakura Ando, the lead character in her film, as being "more like a fairy. A mysterious creature". Seed is the story of the journey this girl takes from the enchanted nature of Nara to the chaos of Tokyo, and the encounters she has along the way. A boy offers her the gift of an apple, which she in turn gives to a homeless man, who proffers her a soft piece of chiffon fabric in exchange. Moving like a tree that sways in the wind, the girl expresses a spirit that secretly runs through places and living things. The eleventh film commissioned by Miu Miu Women's Tales was directed by the multiple Cannes award-winning Japanese director Naomi Kawase.
Sentaro runs a small bakery that serves dorayaki pastries filled with sweet red bean paste (“an”). When an old lady, Tokue, offers to help in the kitchen he reluctantly accepts. She will soon prove to have magic in her hands…
Taking place during the full-moon night of traditional dances in August and set on the Japanese island of Amami-Oshima, the drama centers on a 14-year-old boy who finds a dead body floating in the sea. The young man enlists the help of his girlfriend to solve the mystery. The pair will learn to become adults by experiencing the interwoven cycles of life, death and love.
A Korean Film director, Kim Taehoon plans to shoot his new film in a small local city called Gojo, Japan. He travels with his assistant director, Park Mijeong to do research prior to scriptwriting. They travel through several villages that are declining, and interview some local residents there. Most people say there is nothing special about Gojo. Along the way, Kim and Park meet a municipal official, Yusuke and a middle-aged man, Kenji, and are deeply impressed by their stories. The night before director Kim is to leave Japan, having a strange dream, he wakes up in the middle of night, and looks up at the night sky in Gojo.
It was summer when a stranger from Tokyo arrived at “Iya”, where the riches of nature still abound. This young man, named Kudo, was willing to live his new, self-sufficient life. He was exhausted by city life, and believed this beautiful land would give him some rest. On the contrary, the reality was not as easy as he thought. There was a confliction between a local construction company and a group of nature conservationists. Farmers are trying to save their harvests from harmful animals such as deer and monkeys. People are fighting for their own purposes: to get their job, to save the environment, or to survive.
In memory of the Japanese earthquake on 3.11, each director presents a 3 minute and 11 second short film in tribute to those who were lost that day.
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
The exhibition 'The Complete Letters' features epistolary works defined by cinematographic creation. This is an experimental communication format used between pairs of film directors. Although each director is situated in a location geographically distant from that of their partner, they are united by their willingness to share ideas and reflections on all that motivates their work. Within this space of freedom, the directors featured in the exhibition examine their affinities and differences, within an environment of mutual respect and simultaneity of interests and with notable formal variants established in each of the correspondences.
Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi
In the film Koma, Kawase explores the relationship between fragile and often tense history between Korea and Japan through the relationship that develops between a third generation Korean-Japanese man, who unexpectedly visits the small and quiet village of Koma, and a Japanese woman, a somewhat mysterious inhabitant of the village.
A caregiver at a small retirement home takes one of her patients for a drive to the country, but the two wind up stranded in a forest where they embark on an exhausting and enlightening two-day journey.
Tarachime is a documentary film which observes 'life' through childbirth. Kawase Naomi, a film director working under the theme of family, life and death, presents the bond of life through her own childbirth experience. Since the summer of 2006, the film has been broadcast throughout Europe and awarded a number of prizes at film festivals, arousing sensations around the world. Bearing a new life means dividing our life. First, I was planning to film from the day I conceived a child and to the moment I gave birth. But I realized, while filming, that this is not the story of "one life." In the end, the film sublimed to a higher stage on which we can witness the knot tying one life with another.
Kazuo Nishii, renowned editor and photography critic, died in 2001 of stomach cancer. Two months earlier he contacted Naomi Kawase, whose works he admired, to document the remaining weeks of his life. Kawase visits him in the hospital and films the progression of his sickness and the conversations between the two.
In the follow-up to Embracing (1992), Naomi Kawase learns of her father's death and struggles with her loneliness and the feeling of having been abandoned by her parents.
Naomi Kawase collaborates with Shinya Arimoto, a Taiyo award-winning photographer she knows from university, to create a photo album of Machiko Ono (who Kawase scouted for her previous feature film Moe no Suzaku) and Mika Mifune (daughter of famous actor Toshiro Mifune) with the idea to contrast these two aspiring actresses, Ono coming from the rural Nara and Mifune from Tokyo. Kawase documents the photo shooting and interviews Arimoto, Ono and Mifune as the work progresses, while the tension between her and Arimoto increases over disagreement on the direction of the project.
The last piece of the trilogy, following Katatsumori and Seen the Heaven, filming her grandma and herself. Her gazes and insights are cast on the lovable beings in front of her eyes.
The film takes shape through the form of a video exchange between Hirokazu Kore-eda and Naomi Kawase. Each films the world around them and intimately reflects on their individual struggles with making films. Kore-eda self-consciously reflects on his process, “What does a camera shoot? What does a film capture? The emptiness in my life reflects in my work.” Kawase concentrates on her everyday life and candid moments with her friends, who say, “Hang in there Naomi we are all on your side,” and, “You never keep the promises you make, but I love you anyway.”
Naomi Kawase observes people in the city of Shibuya with curiosity and openness, drawing parallels between life and filmmaking and discovering her abilities as a filmmaker.
Long ago, Nara was the capital of ancient Japan. Nothing has changed in this place.
An old Chinese woman visits Japan to find her missing daughter whom she adopted in post-WWII China. Her granddaughter and a retired Japanese policeman join her search.
