As part of a Cinema Lesson organized by the Cinémathèque de Nice, Japanese director Naomi Kawase attended the preview screening of her film Voyage à Yoshino on Tuesday, November 20.
“My career has been very fortunate to intersect with the Cannes festival,” she said at the town hall on Tuesday morning. Indeed, the director is a regular on the red carpet, having notably won a Camera d’Or in 1997 for her first feature film Suzaku, as well as the Grand Jury Prize in 2007 for The Mourning Forest.
Her latest film tells the journey of Jeanne, played by Juliette Binoche, who decides to go to Japan to retrieve a rare medicinal plant. She will meet a forest ranger named Tomo and reconnect with a distant past. Naomi Kawase’s cinema often deals with the theme of disappearance and reveals to viewers a rural Japan contrasting with the expansive urbanization with which we usually associate the country.
“I come from the local tradition, and my cinema allows me to share my identity,” she emphasized. With great elegance, the director explained her desire always to show reality as synonymous with authenticity within her works. “This reality within ourselves, which is also the truth,” she concluded.
Robin Poncelet
