Serpent's Path

Born in Kobe on July 19, 1955, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not related to director Akira Kurosawa. After studying at Rikkyo University in Tokyo under the guide of prominent film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, where he began making 8mm films, Kurosawa began directing commercially in the 1980s, working on pink films and low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza pictures. In the early 1990s, he won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute and was able to study filmmaking in the United States, although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.

Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his serial killer film Kyua (Cure) (1997). Also that year, Kurosawa experimented by filming two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider, both of which shared the same premise (a father taking revenge for his child’s murder) and lead actor (Show Aikawa) but spun entirely different stories.

Kurosawa followed up Cure with a semi-sequel in 1999, Charisma, which established his penchant for apocalyptic imagery and themes of identity and isolation. In 2001 Kurosawa directed Pulse, a film about ghosts invading the world of the living by way of the Internet. More recently Kurosawa has released Akarui Mirai (Bright Future) (2003), starring Tadanobu Asano, the first film of his shot with a 24p High-definition video camera. Kurosawa followed this with another digital feature, Doppelganger, later the same year.

A skilled writer, he has written novelizations of some of his films as well as a history of horror cinema with Makoto Shinozaki. He recently made a cameo in Kôji Shiraishi’s horror film Occult as himself.

Kurosawa’s directing style has been compared to that of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, though he has never expressly listed those directors as influences. Nevertheless he admitted in a interview that Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujiro Ozu features analyzed and discussed under the guidance of Shigehiko Hasumi contributed to shape his personal vision of the medium.

Many of his films are concerned in some form with the way society shapes the individual, with individuals obsessed with some eccentric project, or how social mechanisms disintegrate when faced with the wholly irrational. Cure is widely cited as the best example of all of these concepts in one film, but they show up in others as well: Bright Future combines the first and second in its plot about a ruminative young man trying to accommodate a jellyfish to live in fresh water with unexpected results.

According to Tim Palmer, Kurosawa’s films occupy a peculiar position between the materials of mass genre, on the one hand, and esoteric or intellectual abstraction, on the other. They also clearly engage with issues of environmental critique, given Kurosawa’s preference for shooting in decaying open spaces, abandoned (and often condemned) buildings, and in places rife with toxins, pestilence and entropy. This subtext of environmental collapse—which nuances his typically nominal horror plotting—takes on particular irony and prescience in the wake of the 2011 earthquakes and tsunamis which decimated the East of Japan and induced a near ecological meltdown. —Wikipedia