The 35th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival will honour Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu and Japanese master Koji Fukada with the Kurosawa Akira Award. It is the first time in 14 years that this trophy is being given.
The Festival runs from October 24 to November 2.
The 10-day cinematic event will also present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Nogami Teruyo, who had collaborated with Kurosawa on several movies.
Steven Spielberg, Yamada Yoji and Hou Hsiao Hsien have in the past been honoured with the Kurosawa Award.
Oscar-winning helmer Inarritu’s latest work, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, competed for the Golden Lion at the recent Venice Film Festival.
I missed Bardo because of erratic flight schedules to Venice – a troublesome part of the post-pandemic times. The Guardian critic, Peter Bradshaw, had this to say about Inarritu’s work: It’s a quite staggeringly self-indulgent and self-congratulatory film – somewhere on a continuum between Fellini and Malick – about a Mexican journalist and documentary film-maker who has been lavishly rewarded in the United States and is now receiving a big prize, usually given only to Americans. (Iñárritu has, I suspect, a slightly sketchy idea about the working lives of actual journalist-slash-documentary film-makers, as opposed to those of colossally important Oscar-winning feature directors.) But now, at this moment of triumph, our hero finds himself in a midlife crisis of identity, plunged into a rabbit hole of memories and hallucinatory anxieties about his family, his career and Mexico itself.”
But Inarritu has made some brilliant movies. His Babel was just mesmeric in which he combines several stories happening in several countries and directs them towards a compelling finale. His other notable features include 21 Grams, Biutiful and Birdman or the Unexpected virtue of ignorance. His 2015 The Revenant won the Best Picture Oscar and the Best Supporting Actor trophy out of the 12 nominations it clinched.
Fukada’s latest film, Love Life, also screened in Venice’s competition this year. It is marked by grief and guilt a delicately tangled tale of generational conflict and silences that drive a couple apart.
The festival will also honour Nogami with the Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her extraordinary career and contributions to Japanese cinema.
She is best known for having worked with acclaimed auteur Kurosawa, beginning with Rashomon in 1950 and participating in all his subsequent films including Seven Samurai1954) and Ran (1985) – with the exception of The Idiot in 1951 – serving as a script supervisor and production manager.
She later worked on Koizumi Takashi’s After The Rain (2000) and Letters From The Mountains (2002) as the director’s assistant.
In 1984, Requiem For My Father, a documentary about her childhood, won the Yomiuri Women’s Human Documentary Excellence Award and Yoji Yamada adapted the story to make Kabei: Our Mother in 2008.
She is also the author of books such as Waiting On The Weather: Making Movies With Akira Kurosawa.
Read all the Latest Movies News and Breaking News here