Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Drive My Car won the Oscar; Happy Hour runs five hours on four Kobe friendships. Hamaguchi builds films out of conversation, rehearsal and chance, and finds his drama in the act of listening.
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All of a Sudden
Marie-Lou Fontaine, director of a nursing home in the Paris suburbs, defies convention by adopting the 'Humanitude' method despite her team’s resistance. Her encounter with Mari Morisaki, a terminally ill Japanese playwright, transforms her life.
Defining films
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Both contemporary Japanese masters of intimate realism, exploring family, time, and the small gestures that carry emotional weight.
Shared obsession with prolonged dialogue and marital dissolution, cinema as phenomenology of human disconnection.
Both dissolve narrative convention through duration and repetition, time itself becomes the subject, memory bleeds into present.
East Asian art cinema practitioners distributed through international festival circuits, both prioritize stillness and accumulated temporal pressure over plot.
In their own words
Kiarostami is someone whose films I really admire, particularly The Wind Will Carry Us. There are moments in my films where characters are inside cars, driving around and having conversations, perhaps it's like a kind of unconscious influence.
I would say Kiarostami is someone whose films I really admire, and particularly The Wind Will Carry Us. There are moments in my films where characters are inside cars, driving around and having conversations, perhaps it's like a kind of unconscious influence.
