The director raises her voice in anger, blaming her foster mother for threatening to abandon her as a young girl. Her impatience with her foster mother’s senility, and her affectionate gaze on the aging naked body. The birth of her son. Twelve years after Katatsumori, her first film about her foster mother, the director depicts one life growing old and drawing closer to death even as another life is bestowed through birth. This moving work quietly juxtaposes the two.

biografia

Naomi Kawase is a Japanese film director. She was the youngest person to win the Caméra d’Or (for best debut feature film) at the Cannes film festival, for Moe no suzaku [1997]. Kawase began her career as a film director with autobiographical documentaries. Ni tsutsumarete (Embracing) [1992] documented her search to find her father, whom she had not seen since early childhood, after her parents’ divorce. In her second film, Katatsumori [1994], Kawase portraited her great-aunt, who raised her. These and other intimate family themes are recurrent in Kawase’s nonfiction filmography between 1992 and 2012. Since 1997, she also directed several critical acclaimed and multi awarded full-length feature films. In 2007, Kawase won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest), which explored the themes of death and bereavement that had dominated some of her earlier works.

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