A Palme d’Or has its advantages and disadvantages, and that is something that Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda can certainly attest to. After Shoplifters made the rounds on the festival circuit, Kore-eda was attacked by a series of critics back home in Japan, who saw the film’s content as essentially anti-Japanese. Kore-eda’s choice to reject an award from the local Ministry of Culture, considering that the film had been partially financed by government funds, did nothing more than add even more fuel to the fire [1]. That’s one side of the story. On the other hand, after Shoplifters’ resounding success, Kore-eda had, in fact, a carte blanche which would allow him to work on just about any project he wished to. For a director with such a heterogeneous oeuvre, Kore-eda’s next step was typically atypical: although all of his films to that point had been set in Japan, for his new project, Kore-eda temporarily turned his back on his native country. Instead, Kore-eda recycled the text for a theatre play that he had been working on for several years and then adapted its setting to France.

Codrin Vasile

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He studied directing at UNATC, where he wrote articles for Film Menu. He also wrote his degree paper on D.A. Pennebaker’s early filmography. He is interested in analog photography and video art. He hopes for a Criterion release of Shrek 2. He makes movies.

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