Naomi Kawase

How to portray Naomi Kawase? Well, first of all, as a natural born filmmaker. Or in other words, as someone who appears to have been placed on this Earth with the specific purpose of making films in such genius way they would remind us and connect us most effectively with essential things in life such as love and pain. And there is one place in life where we will most easily find these issues blooming and spreading: family.

Indeed, all throughout her films, both documentaries and fictions, family is a big thing in Kawase’s world. A declared fan of Victor Erice, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Dardenne Brothers, Kawase was born in 1969 in Nara, Japan. She was left by her divorced parents to be raised by her great uncles, a scar that would become a primal drive in her later work. Her loving but hard relationship with her great aunt (“grandma”) and the moving search for her absent father were some of the main themes in early documentaries such as Embracing, Katatsumori and Kya ka ra ba a. Her latest one, Tarachime, is “exhibit A” for the argument made before about her natural pre-disposition for filmmaking. Tarachime is an essay on motherhood in which we witness the birth of Kawase’s son Mitsuki. The instant after she gives birth to him, her first reflex is to grab her video camera and turn that unique and transcendental moment of her life into cinema. In that precise moment, the relation between her and her camera, which she holds while observing her baby, is a tight and profound bond, as natural as the umbilical chord still connecting her to her newborn. And so, as they are bind together, Naomi (pardon, but it’s impossible not to use her first name after sharing such intimacy), her son Mitsuki, and the camera, all become one: a beautiful and breathtaking work of art. It’s of the most marvelous simplicity: in Kawase’s films cinema is life, and life is cinema.

A long time ago, Samuel Fuller appeared in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and defined cinema in one word: emotions. In their most natural and pure state, human emotions are what makes us feel alive, and there’s no life without emotions. Just as her documentaries work on her own personal issues and become marvelous takes on universal feelings, in Kawase’s fiction films feelings emerge from deep rooted places and are slowly and calmly unfolded until they become transparent. Her love for hand held camera and thorough acting direction are some of the means in which she very assuredly peels off her stories and characters until there’s nothing left but the naked core of human emotions. Those are sublime moments, and they’re precisely what makes Naomi Kawase’s films so unique and wonderful: whether it is an overwhelming street parade on a rainy Nara summer afternoon (as the one featured in Shara, probably one of the greatest and most breathtaking scenes in recent cinema), or a phone call to a long lost father (Embracing), or even an old man and a girl enjoying a watermelon (The Mourning Forest), Naomi Kawase’s films heal and sweep us away with comfort. They go to cathartic extremes, but they are nevertheless smoothening and eased by a sweet and calm feel of tranquility, making us feel – as we watched people struggling with the purest of hardships - that still everything is going to be ok.

Agustín Mango

INTERVIEW: LAETITIA MIKLES

In Rien ne s’efface (Nothing Vanishes), Laetitia Mikles explores the art of Kawase.

How did you become interested in Kawase’s work? I first saw Naomi Kawase’s work in Nyon (Switzerland) in 2000 : the Documentary International Film Festival dedicated her a retrospective. There, I discovered her work, a sensitive, enigmatic and poetic cinema. I made an interview with her but, I don’t know how, an evil genius erased the tape on which I recorded the interview. So, my movie “Rien ne s’efface” (Nothing vanishes) was a way to repair that irony of fate by proposing to Naomi Kawase a new conversation. But this new meeting would, this time, be a documentary.

What is the reason why your film covers only Kawase’s work in documentaries? Actually it does refer to three of her fictions: Shara, Firefly and The Mourning Forest but it is true that I have a preference for her documentaries because I think Naomi Kawase is the filmmaker of what Japanese people call the “nichijô” : she loves to celebrate the beauty of everyday life. And, at the same time, with her unique sensitiveness, she succeeds to catch very intimate and sometimes very painful moments of her personal life in a way that moves everyone.

What is the most interesting feature that you discovered in Kawase’s approach to cinema? It is her freedom: in all the film in which she questions her identity, and her relation to her beloved ones (in particularly to her grandmother), she does it in a very spontaneous, even harsh way, regardless to conventions. She is not afraid of exposing herself because cinema is truly a part of her intimate life.

Is there a connection between Kawase’s work in documentary and her fiction films? Of course! In my documentary she explains that she doesn’t like to write detailed script because she trusts more the actors’ improvisation. She likes the unexpected side of the shootings. She explains that if she were planning to strictly her movies ahead of time, she would get bored. She says it would be like trying to command to the wind to blow.

Natalia Ames