Year: 2004
Duration: 26'
In
Kage
Kawase Naomi explores
the truth behind her desires, her fears, her shadows. She recreates an
unhoped-for and touching encounter with her father, who died years
earlier and
is an awkward "shadow" floating like a painful
absence in the previous works by
the Japanese director. In this short film, halfway between fiction and
documentary, the ghost paradoxically becomes the director herself,
speaking
off-camera and filming the daughter he never knew. But suddenly these
sequences
are joined by others, filmed by a second camera, which represent the
director's
subjective point of view. This film within a film has a contradictory
effect.
Rather than insert the emotional impact of the encounter into a new
perspective, it confers a more abstract truth to the preceding scenes,
giving
them a sort of veracity.
Biography
film director
Naomi Kawase
Naomi Kawase (Nara, Japan, 1969) studied at the Osaka School of Photography, where she graduated in 1989. Between 1988 and 1997 she made numerous shorts, medium-length films and autobiographical documentaries. Her first feature film, Suzaku, won the Caméra d’or at the 50th Cannes Film Festival. She then made Firefly, which won the FIPRESCI Award and the C.I.C.A.E. Award at Locarno in 2000, as well as documentaries like Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth or Birth/Mother. In 2007, she directed The Mourning Forest, which won the Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. She is president of the Nara International Film Festival. Hanezu screened in competition at Cannes.
FILMOGRAFIA
filmografia essenziale/essential filmography
Ni tsutsumarete (Embracing, cm, doc., 1992), Katatsumori (mm, doc., 1994), Ten, mitake (See Heaven, cm, doc., 1995), Moe no suzaku (Suzaku, 1997), The Weald (doc., 1997), Manguekyo (doc., 1999), Hotaru (Firefly, 2000), Kya ka ra ba a (Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, mm, doc., 2001), Tsuioku no dansu (Letter from a Yellow Cherry Blossom, doc., 2003), Sharasojyu (Shara, 2003), Tarachime (Birth/Mother, cm, doc., 2006), Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest, 2007), Nanayomachi (Seven Nights, 2008), Koma (mm, 2009), In Between Days (mm, doc., 2009), Genpin (doc., 2010), Hanezu no tsuki (Hanezu, 2011).