Hirokazu Koreeda

Hirokazu Koreeda (“Shoplifters”) wrote this film after his mother died, and he admits that much of her behaviour found its way into it. It’s so spare and yet so warm that it recalls the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu, and when it ends, you’ll want to pick up the phone and call your parents. — On a summer day, the Yokoyamas gather at the family home by the sea, as they do every year on the anniversary of their eldest son’s death. Junpei drowned saving a boy he didn’t know. The second son, Ryota, restores paintings without much success, and his parents have never warmed to his wife, a widow with a young son. And every year the mother invites the boy Junpei saved, now a grown man.

Hirokazu Koreeda (“Shoplifters”) doesn’t speak Korean, but that didn’t stop him making a film in it, and Song Kang-ho (“Parasite”) became the first Korean man ever to leave Cannes with an acting prize. Two con men steal an abandoned baby to sell to parents who’ll pay, and we end up rooting for them. — On a rainy night a woman leaves her baby in a church baby box and walks away, and the two men who work there take the boy before anyone can register him. When she comes back the next morning, she climbs into their van instead of going to the police. The three of them set off across the country looking for a couple who’ll pay for the child, with two policewomen watching their every move. — Best Actor Award (Song Kang-Ho) | Cannes Film Festival | 2022 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2022

Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”) directs a screenplay that won at Cannes, telling the same week three times, through the eyes of a mother, a teacher and a child. The mother is sure her son’s teacher has hurt him, but the truth is more complicated, and the music is among the last Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote. — Saori is raising her son Minato alone when she notices a change in his behaviour and finds injuries on him that she can’t explain. From what the boy tells her, the blame lies with his teacher, so she takes it to the school. But there is something Minato hasn’t told her. — Best Screenplay | Cannes Film Festival | 2023 Queer Palm | Cannes Film Festival | 2023 Official Selection | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2023

Hirokazu Koreeda made this courtroom drama a year before “Shoplifters” conquered Cannes, and he shows you the murder in the very first minute. For the next two hours you won’t believe your own eyes, because the killer has confessed but keeps changing his story. Is justice just a matter of paperwork? — The case is lost before the lawyer even takes it on. His client, accused of murder and theft, has already confessed, and the crime carries the death penalty. Yet the further the lawyer digs into what happened, the less sure he becomes that the man he’s defending really killed anyone. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2017

It took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, even as its director was accused back home in Japan of bringing shame on his country. A family who shoplift to survive take in a child who isn’t theirs, and ending up with them is the best thing that has ever happened to her. — Fresh from another petty theft, a man and his son find a little girl out in the freezing cold, clearly chilled to the bone. His wife isn’t keen at first, but she ends up agreeing to take the girl in and look after her. Money is short and they scrape by from day to day, yet theirs is a happy home, until the day something goes wrong. — Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2019 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2018

Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”) doesn’t speak French, but he directed Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche in it anyway, in a sharp, funny, unpretentious film about family. For a film star the plain truth is just too dull, and the trouble starts when she lies about her daughter’s life too. — After fifty years as a star of French cinema, Fabienne has just published her memoirs. When her daughter Lumir, a screenwriter, flies in from New York with her husband and their little girl, she reads the book and finds that her mother has lied about her childhood. It puts Fabienne at school gates where she never waited and at a school play she never came to. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2019

Koreeda’s first fiction feature was shown at Venice, where it won an award for its cinematography. Until then he had made only television documentaries, and you can feel it in the way he watches a woman in a house by the winter sea, trying to find meaning after a painful loss. — Yumiko was still a child in Osaka when her grandmother left home to go back to Shikoku to die, and nobody ever found her. Years later Yumiko has found happiness with her husband Ikuo and their baby son, until one night Ikuo walks home along the railway tracks and is killed by a train, and nobody can say what he was doing there. When a matchmaker finds her a widower on the Noto peninsula, she packs up her child and leaves. — Best Cinematography | Venice Film Festival | 1995 OCIC Award - Special Mention | Venice Film Festival | 1995

What if you could keep only one memory from your whole life? Koreeda put that question to five hundred people and wove their answers into a story of a bureaucratic afterlife, whose Japanese title, “Wandafuru raifu”, nods to Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. You’ll start asking yourself too. — After death, the first stop is a modest office, where the dead turn up on a Monday morning. Each is given a room and a single task: to choose one memory from their whole life to keep for all eternity, and they have a few days to decide. Whatever they pick will be recreated, filmed and shown back to them, while everything else they remember disappears. It isn’t an easy choice. — FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 1998