Naomi Kawase

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Set in the mountains of rural Nara prefecture, the film centers on the Tahara family who eke out a living from the local ancient cedar forests. The head of the family, Kyozo, becomes fixated by plans to build a tunnel to improve the accessibility of the area. Construction begins, but is halted halfway through. Fifteen years later building has still not restarted, and the family is destitute. Against this backdrop, some family affairs develop. Kyozo’s daughter, Michiru, starts to fall in love with Eisuke, her cousin. Eisuke, meanwhile, finds himself attracted to his aunt.Read More »

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Nanayo is the latest film from Naomi Kawase, the winner of the Grand Prix at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival with The Mourning Forest and BAFF 2003 with Shara. Making a change from Kawase’s former films, which are all set in her native Nara, Nanayo was shot in a poetic village in Thailand. The movie details the human drama that unfolds as different people of different nationalities happen to come together under one roof in a house in the middle of a forest. Lacking a common language, the art of traditional Thai massage becomes the tool they use to communicate. Read More »

Emotionally withdrawn strip club dancer Ayako has never recovered from her mother’s suicide when she was young. She begins a relationship with patient potter Daiji, but leaves him behind when she quits her job and returns to her home town after a 10 year absence.Read More »

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n April 24, 2004, Kawase Naomi had a son, Mitsuki. Following Japanese tradition, she gave birth on a tatami mat, assisted by a midwife and surrounded by all her family. As soon as the umbilical cord was cut, she tools up her camera and films every day her child and her ninety-year-old grandmother. With this highly emotionally affecting «docu-diary» the filmmaker continues to reflect on the world around her, her origins and the future. Although she initially wanted to describe only the life she carried within her for nine months, Kawase Naomi eventually extended the scope of her film to include Mitsuki’s interaction with those around him. By deliberately breaking with any notion of linear temporarily, she creates, with gentleness but also with harshness and violence, a pendulum like movement between moments, past and present feelings. Read More »

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.Read More »

In this autobiographical documentary, filmmaker Naomi Kawase seeks to reach her mother and father who abandoned her at birth.Read More »

Kawase’s contribution to the 2009 Jeonju Digital Project.

A Japanese-Korean man (Kitamura Kizuki) travels to a village in Nara to fulfill his late grandfather’s final wish. A local woman (Nakamura Yuko) shows him around town, but the relationship grows into something beyond visitor-and-guide.Read More »

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About Tadashi Yoshimura’s maternity clinic where he practice “natural births” deep in the forest of Okazaki (Japan).

The Japan Times wrote:
The pain of childbirth, Genesis says, is God’s punishment for the original sin of womankind — if only Eve hadn’t given Adam that apple! But in Japan, traditionalists contend, it’s to be embraced, not lamented, since the deeper the agony, the deeper the motherly love. So hold the epidurals, please, we’re Japanese.Read More »

Juliette Binoche finds rapture in the forests of Yoshino

Jeanne (Juliette Binoche) travels to Japan to search for the rare medicinal plant ‘Vision’, which according to legend only appears once every 997 years under special conditions. On her trip, she meets Tomo, a forest ranger, who joins her in her quest and helps retrace her past. Twenty years earlier, in the same forests of Yoshino where Jeanne now hopes to find Vision, she experienced her first true love.Read More »