NAOMI KAWASE Retrospective coming to MoMA NY

Japanese film director Naomi Kawase

Naomi Kawase Retrospective

When: June 25–July 14, 2016

Where: : Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

11 West 53rd Street, NYC

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Naomi Kawase is among the most renowned contemporary Japanese filmmakers. She began making films in 1988, when she was 19 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 abandonment by her birth 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 to date. 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.

Kawase’s films are often based in her native Nara Prefecture, the woodsy, rural area of one of the ancient capitals of Japan. Nature, the elements, and the seasons are important signposts in all of her films, signifying both permanence and the cycles of life. Japanese culture, traditional ritual, and music are also significant elements in her films, and she often works with a combination of professional and non-professional actors.

Kawase studied television and film at Visual Arts Osaka, graduating in 1989. She founded Kumie Inc. Production Company in 1996, and the Nara International Film Festival in 2010. Kawase received the Chevalier des Arts et des Letters of France in 2015.

SWEET BEAN opens Friday, March 18th in NYC; national roll out to follow

A Kino Lorber Release

Kyara Uchida (left), Kirin Kiki (center), and Masatoshi Nagase

Sweet Bean / An

Written and Directed by Naomi Kawase

Starring Kirin Kiki, Masatoshi Nagase and Kyara Uchida 

Japan, 2015, 113 minutes

Official Selection: 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard

Official Selection: 2015 Toronto International Film Festival

Sweet Bean, a food-themed drama from writer-director Naomi Kawase, is scheduled to open in New York on Friday, March 18 at Lincoln Plaza Cinema followed by national roll out.

In Ms. Kawase’s graceful tale adapted from the novel by Durian Sukegawa, introverted loner Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase, Mystery Train) runs a tiny “dorayaki” (pancakes filled with an, a sweet red bean paste) stand in the suburbs of Tokyo. When 76-year-old Tokue (veteran actress Kirin Kiki, Still Walking, Chronicle of My Mother), persistently asks Sentaro to work in the shop’s kitchen, he reluctantly accepts. It soon turns out that in addition to having uncanny culinary skills (her an is much more delicious than Sentaro’s) and a mysterious communion with nature, Tokue has the ability to transform those around her, including Wakana (newcomer Kyara Uchida, real-life granddaughter of Kirin Kiki), a shy teenage schoolgirl who’s a regular at the shop. Thanks to Tokue’s sweet bean recipe, the little business soon flourishes, and with time, Sentaro and Tokue open their hearts to reveal old wounds and painful secrets.

Sweet Bean writer-director Naomi Kawase

Born and raised in Nara, Japan, writer-director Naomi Kawase has been a fixture at the Cannes Film Festival since 1997 when she became the youngest director to win the Camera d’Or (Best First Film Award) for her debut feature Suzaku. With her fourth feature, The Mourning Forest, she received the 2007 Cannes Grand Prix, and became, in 2013, the first Japanese director to serve on the Cannes competition jury. Known for her introspective and poetic fiction works focusing on family and the characters’ connection to nature, she also directed two autobiographical documentaries, Embracing and Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, in which she examined the loss of being abandoned by her parents as a child.