The Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda trains his camera on the minor yet meaningful moments in his characters’ lives: drops of rain against skin, corn fritters frying in oil, morning train rides. These quotidian points in time, made significant by the spectre of loss, creep up on the viewer, inviting them into an onscreen universe so tender that it’s difficult to leave behind.
“What makes a family?” is a question Kore-eda returns to time and time again, creating a body of work that deconstructs the nuclear family, explores intergenerational tensions and celebrates nonbiological ties. Alongside the stillness and humanism of his work, these themes have earned him comparisons to Tokyo Story director Yasujiro Ozu. He says he’s more like British socialist filmmaker Ken Loach, though, and that tracks: Kore-eda’s films often depict the lives of the marginalised, in a nation experiencing crises of population and loneliness. He’s also dabbled in the metaphysical, experimenting with ideas like purgatory, wishing stars, and anthropomorphism. His empathetic approach is the throughline, but each Kore-eda film is a unique experience.
In the years since his Palme d’Or win for Shoplifters, the Cannes Film Festival regular has embarked on a world tour of sorts—his 2019 film The Truth was set in France and co-stars Hollywood actor Ethan Hawke, while his upcoming Korean-language debut Broker features Parasite actor Song Kang-ho and K-pop star IU. He’s also venturing into episodic television by creating and directing many episodes of the Netflix series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House. As the Japanese master enters the next stage of his career, here’s how to catch up on his films.
The entry point is… Nobody Knows
The 2004 film Nobody Knows was inspired by true events: in 1988, a mother abandoned her five young children to fend for themselves in a tiny Tokyo apartment. However, while the news media fixated on the mother, Kore-eda was more interested in the children’s inner lives as they lived on their own for almost a year. Nobody Knows follows the coming of age of 12-year-old Akira (Yuya Yagira, whose performance made him the youngest-ever winner of the Best Actor award at Cannes) as he becomes the de-facto caretaker of his three younger siblings. Largely unscripted and instead led by its child actors’ intuition, the film is both a celebration of youthful resilience and a condemnation of the adults who neglect them. Nobody Knows is an early version of a signature Kore-eda family drama—something he reinvents many times over the course of his career.
Necessary viewing? Still Walking
Still Walking, Kore-eda’s tribute to his late mother, invites us into the home of the multigenerational Yokoyama family as they gather for a commemorative ritual. It documents the universal experience of grown-up children returning to their childhood home, where old tensions bubble and the past resurfaces. It taps into our endless battles with grief and responsibility—the feeling that we should have spent more time with our loved ones, but is there ever enough time? Kore-eda achieves this almost entirely using static shots in small spaces, in what is perhaps his most meditative, contained film. Still Walking is a portrait of the unspoken, of love hovering in the air with nowhere to go, comprised of coded exchanges, mundane transactions of objects, and ASMR-worthy food preparation. In this masterclass in restraint, Kore-eda evokes more with one move of the camera than most filmmakers can with a hundred.
The one everyone’s seen is… Shoplifters
This Cannes winner and Oscar nominee tells the tale of a makeshift family, who subsists by shoplifting, as they take in a young girl they find outside in the cold. Shoplifters begins as a slice-of-life depiction of bonds that run deeper than blood, but takes a morally gray turn when the family’s son is arrested, and the reason for their under-the-radar existence is revealed. Shoplifters is Kore-eda at the height of his powers: an engrossing window into the life of an unconventional family that culminates in a heartbreaking gut-punch, leaving the viewer to contemplate the complicated ethics of chosen families and cycles of mistreatment.
The underappreciated gem is… After Life
In 1998’s After Life, purgatory is bureaucratic. A group of recently deceased people find themselves in a social services-esque building, asked to choose one memory from their lives to take with them to eternity. The film follows the difficult process of selecting that perfect memory, which the staff will then recreate as a short film to be rewatched forever. An experimental concept shot to resemble a documentary, After Life questions how we remember our own lives—and how memory is ultimately a fluid force that rewrites itself. In the same vein as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, the film also doubles as an expression of the power of the image, and of filmmaking itself, as an instrument of remembrance.
The deep cut is… Air Doll
“Inflatable sex doll comes to life” may sound more like a Black Mirror episode or a raunchy 2000s comedy than a Criterion Channel title, but trust Kore-eda to turn that concept into a deeply moving experience. Air doll Nozomi (Bae Doona) develops consciousness and ventures out into the world beyond her owner’s apartment. We stroll along as she learns the ropes of having a heart, entering a cynical world with fragility and wonder as she searches for a meaningful connection. Shot by In the Mood for Love cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, Air Doll taps into a similar sense of urban isolation, but this time in a sanitised Tokyo where desires are never fulfilled by the real thing. “It seems life is constructed in a way that no one can fulfil it alone,” Nozomi recites from a poem, spelling out the unifying thesis of Kore-eda filmography.
Broker is in UK cinemas 24 February. The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House is streaming on Netflix.