Opening Film Programme Re-Imagining Asia

Talking heads – pans to still lifes – introspection before the camera: Naomi Kawase’s films are both extremely personal and distanced at the same time. In her search for her father, she interviews herself in Embracing through a relative in an attempt to come closer to a person she had never got to know. In Birth/Mother, she attacks her grandmother – one can see every wrinkle on her naked body – over an old moral transgression and shows a close-up of the birth of her own child. The Mourning Forest, a very beautiful film about the joys and pains associated with remembering, leads a widow and her nurse, who has just lost her child, into a real and metaphorical forest in which the present and the past blend into one. The uniqueness and fragility of existence are always central themes in Kawase’s films.

Naomi Kawase (*1969) lives in Nara, Japan. For The Mourning Forest she received the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes in 2007.

Embracing / Ni tsutsumarete

Documentary film, Japan 1992, 40 min, Engl. subtitles

Birth/Mother / Tarachime

Documentary film, France/Japan 2006, 43 min, Engl. subtitles

The Mourning Forest / Mogari No Mori

Feature film, France/Japan 2007, 97 min, Engl. subtitles

For the film 'Birth/Mother' with thanks to ARTE France