Embracing

Naomi Kawase was born in 1969, at a time when Japanese cinema was thriving with vigorous underground filmmaking, the initial streak in Kawase’s own young career. While studying photography at the Osaka School of Visual Arts, she started to make films as part of a workshop: “I focus on that which interests me” (1988), a personal symphony of the city, “The concretization of these things flying around me” (1989), a silent study of the homeless, "Presently (1989), a poetic piece visualising the 4 elements (water, air, fire and earth). After graduating in 1989, she taught for 4 years.

In 1992, she made Embracing, a medium length 16mm feature in which she sets up to find her biological father (Naomi was brought up by her grandparents after her parents’ marriage broke up). In 1993, she cast her documentary eye on a striking boy-meets-girl fiction in White Moon. She dedicated her following film Katatsumori (94) to her grandmother. This film and the next one, See Heaven (95), won prizes at the Yamagata International Film Festival. International recognition increased powerfully in 1997 with the Camera d’Or at Cannes and the FIPRESCI Prize at Rotterdam for her first fiction feature, Moe no Suzaku, a tragic family history set against the backdrop of economic recession, shot in her hometown, the provincial city of Nara, a region often featured in her films. The Weald, an intimate depiction of old age, was awarded with a special mention at Visions du Réel in 1999. Mangekyo (1999), her latest documentary about her conflicting working relationship with photographer Shinya Arimoto, was screened at Rotterdam and Visions du Réel. Hotaru, shot again in Nara, is her second fiction feature.

Her producer, Sento Takenori to whom she was married for 2 years, is also the producer of the generation of talented young directors now emerging on the international scene, such as Aoyama Shinji, Hirokazu Koreeda and Nobuhiro Suwa. —Rotterdam Film Festival