The Filmoteca de Catalunya presents a cycle dedicated to the Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase with works full of autobiographical references that include a selection of some of her fiction feature films, as well as her documentaries. The retrospective, which has been released with the film that the director considers her “masterpiece,” Calm waters (2014), will screen nine of his works until May 10.
The cycle is motivated, in part, to take advantage of Kawase’s current stay in Barcelona due to her participation as an actress in the new film by Lluís Miñarro, Emergency Exitwho was co-producer of the drama Calm waters. Kawase describes him as a “strange man” that he met at the San Sebastián festival, and appreciates that they both feel “like brothers who live in different places.” The filmmaker – who at 30 years old became the youngest winner of the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Festival for her first fiction feature film, Suzaku– says that the film they worked on together –Calm waters– is one of the films that has changed his life. The director grew up with her adoptive mother, who was very old and suffered from dementia in the last years of her life. When she passed away 13 years ago, Ella Kawase asked herself: “What is it that unites me to this world now? At that moment, I thought about looking for my origin.” Although she grew up in Nara, part of her family was from the island of Amami Ōshima. That’s where she went to film and discovered that many of her relatives had remained on the island.
In the rest of the series of films and documentaries that will be screened at the Filmoteca during the coming days of May, you can see the autobiographical references that the director incorporates: the relationship with her “grandmother” – this is what Kawase called her adoptive mother – and “with his biological and adoptive family, nature, human relationships and philosophical concerns,” as explained by the director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya, Esteve Riambau, in the presentation of the cycle. Thus, the fiction feature films of her in Sharasojyu (Shara) and An (A pastry shop in Tokyo) converge with the intimacy of his documentaries in Katatsumori (Snail), Ten, Mitake (See Heaven), Hi Wa Katabuki (The Sun Sets), Ni tsutsumarete (Embracing), Kya ka ra ba a (Sky wind fire earth), Tarachime (Birth and motherhood) and Genpin –documentary for which the filmmaker was nominated for the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Festival.
Kawase, one of the few women filmmakers of Japanese origin with international recognition, defends auteur cinema through her works, but also verbally: the director would like independent cinema in Japan, which currently occupies a very secondary position, to have more weight in the country’s audiovisual industry: “it is important to promote independent cinema in Japan, because what works is commercial cinema – manga or literary adaptations – that is designed for the domestic audience” and has no projection outside the country. Kawase’s participation in the international festivals of Cannes, Buenos Aires or Yamagata denotes her international presence, a cinema that she creates for everyone and with the goal that “we can enjoy life more.”
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