Moe No Suzaku

Naomi Kawase

By presenting Naomi Kawase with the « Carrosse d’Or » (Golden Coach) prize, the SRF pays tribute to the work of an independant director considered as one of the most important Japanese filmakers, whose films have initiated a deep renewal. But there is a bond even deeper, more secretive and quasi intimate, that ties the SRF directors to Naomi Kawase. Opening the way for a cinema that explores the interstices and the boundaries and that oscillates between the possibilities of different worlds, it’s when her first film, Suzaku, was selected at the Directors’ Fortnight, that Kawase was awarded with the Golden Camera in Cannes in 1997. Her singular and international career as a director thus started. Born in 1969 in Nara, Japan, Naomi Kawase first directed experimental features while teaching at the prestigious Osaka School of Photography from which she graduated, before being internationally acknowledged with her first documentary feature, Embracing (Ni Tsutsumarete, 1992), in which she goes looking for her father. In 2002, her complete work is showed in Paris at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. From Shara (2003) to Nanayomachi (2008), from Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth (Kya Ka Ra Ba A, 2001) to The Mourning Forest (Mogari no Mori, Grand Prize at the 2007 Cannes film festival), she recreates a unique cinematographical path through her daring and demanding work. Pascale Krief, French director