PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Hirokazu Kore-Eda, the famous Japanese director.
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The subject of one of the 14th Rome Film Fest’s retrospectives as well as guest of a Close Encounter with Fest audiences, the Japanese writer, director and editor Kore-eda Hirokazu is one of the most inspired and acclaimed filmmakers in the world. Over his thirty-year-long career, Kore-eda has crafted a highly personal conception of cinema consisting of intimist films in domestic settings, directed in a delicate, minimalist style and addressing themes like human frailties, childhood, family ties that do not necessarily involve blood relations, and memory (“Without memory we have no identity,” he claimed during an interview with the film critic Mark Schilling). Kore-eda made his directorial debut in 1995, when his film Maborosi was selected for the competitive lineup at the Venice Film Festival, earning him the Golden Osella Award for Best Director. From After Life, which established his reputation internationally, to Like Father, Like Son, winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes; from Shoplifters, nominated for an Oscar® for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the 2019 César for Best Foreign Film, to the most recent The Truth, the stories Kore-eda tells unfold unhurriedly in a lyrical, consolatory universe. Endowed with an astonishing narrative force that constitutes a profound meditation on the most complex and universal aspects of human existence, they are probed by the filmmaker’s gaze until their most hidden and most genuine implications are revealed.