Naomi Kawase
Also Known As: 河瀨直美, 仙頭直美, Sentō Naomi, 가와세 나오미, 센토 나오미, Наоми Кавасэ, 河瀬直美, かわせなおみ
Biography: Naomi Kawase (河瀨直美 Kawase Naomi, born May 30, 1969) is a Japanese film director. She graduated from Visual Arts Osaka in 1989. Many of her works have been documentaries, including Embracing, about her search for the father who abandoned her as a child, and Katatsumori, about the grandmother who raised her. Aside from being a filmmaker, she is the founder and Executive Director for the Nara International Film Festival.
Department: Directing
Place of Birth: Nara, Japan
Adult: No
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Known For:
Love & Pop
Overview: Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 1998-01-10
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Shara
Overview: The Aso family live in the old town of Nara. One Day, Kei, one of the Aso's twin boys suddenly disappears. Five years later seventeen-year old Shun, the remaining twin, is an art student. He now has to move forward with his life, together with his childhood friend, Yu.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2003-07-12
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Destroy Vicious
Overview:
Genres: Crime Drama
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2011-03-05
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Shining Besides Funny Moon
Overview: A sexy mystery movie where a dominatrix and a detective get to the bottom of a string of suicides.
Genres: Mystery
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2013-09-07
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Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth
Overview: Kawase tries to come to terms with her late father, whom she never knew when growing up, and contemplates getting a tattoo like his.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2001-08-09
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Embracing
Overview: A diary film about Kawase's relationship with her grandma and her search for her father, whom she has not seen since her parents divorced during her early childhood.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 1992-01-01
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Letter from a Yellow Cherry Blossom
Overview: Kazuo Nishii, renowned editor and photography critic, died in 2001 of stomach cancer. Two months earlier he contacted Naomi Kawase, whose works he admired, to document the remaining weeks of his life. Kawase visits him in the hospital and films the progression of his sickness and the conversations between the two.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2002-04-06
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Trace
Overview: Kawase pays tribute to the grandmother that raised her after being separated from her parents as a child. The film teems with memories, but it is the faded, dusty photographs capturing the kindness in her grandmother’s shy smile that truly bring the woman to life.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2012-10-30
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See Heaven
Overview: The sequel to Naomi Kawase's Katasumori. The film revisits Kawase’s relationship with her "grandma", capturing their love and attachment towards each other.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 1995-06-06
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The Tale of Iya
Overview: As a tunnel construction project threatens the natural order of one of Japan's last untouched regions, an old man and his granddaughter Haruna's humble lifestyle begins to influence the outlook of a man from Tokyo.
Genres: Drama Fantasy Mystery
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2013-10-22
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Missing Pictures
Overview: For every film completed, dozens of potential films fall by the wayside and never make it onto the big screen. In the VR experience Missing Pictures, Abel Ferrara, Tsai Ming-liang, Catherine Hardwicke, Naomi Kawase, and Lee Myung-Se give us a guided tour of a story they were not able to tell.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2021-06-09
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Birth/Mother
Overview: Tarachime is a documentary film which observes 'life' through childbirth. Kawase Naomi, a film director working under the theme of family, life and death, presents the bond of life through her own childbirth experience. "First, I was planning to film from the day I conceived a child and to the moment I gave birth. But I realized, while filming, that this is not the story of "one life." In the end, the film sublimed to a higher stage on which we can witness the knot tying one life with another."
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2006-08-10
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Memory of the Wind
Overview: Naomi Kawase observes people in the city of Shibuya with curiosity and openness, drawing parallels between life and filmmaking and discovering her abilities as a filmmaker.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 1995-12-31
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It Stopped Raining
Overview: A young bioarchaeologist Yukisuke is attracted to a girl Koyomi, who runs a small stand of taiyaki pastry that he often buys. Koyomi is hospitalized, however, by a car accident on a rainy day after they go out together, and wakes up with short term memory loss, where she cannot remember anything beyond the present day. Yukisuke tries to live close to her as before but the lack of collective memory starts to stagger him.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2020-02-07
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Sun on the Horizon
Overview: The last piece of the trilogy, following 'Katatsumori' and 'See Heaven', filming her grandma and herself. Her gazes and insights are cast on the lovable beings in front of her eyes.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 1996-01-01
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Katatsumori
Overview: Filmmaker Naomi Kawase captures the love, loss, and loneliness felt as she prepares to move out of her foster mother's home.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 1994-05-22
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Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women
Overview: Using rare footage and exclusive interviews with filmmakers from all over the globe, "Reel Herstory" corrects the historic notion that women behind the scenes in motion pictures held peripheral careers compared with their male counterparts.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2014-08-10
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Amami
Overview: Naomi Kawase goes to the south of Japan in search of her family origins on Amami Island, with her four-year-old son Mitsuki. They meet parents, chat with the island’s inhabitants, eat traditional goat soup, observe a total solar eclipse. By reconnecting the threads of her family history, Naomi Kawase gradually fills the void left by her parents' abandonment.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: ja
Release Date: 2016-07-13
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Emergency Exit
Overview: It tells how 14 characters travel in a mysterious vehicle that they cannot easily get out of. Along the way, they fabricate about their identity and travel through unreal landscapes on a journey between life and death, sleep and wakefulness. According to the synopsis, "a tragicomedy with no certainties".
Genres: Drama
Original Language: es
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The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard
Overview: The wolf, the fox & the leopard is a dystopian story about Isa who has been found living amongst the wolves. She is brought back to a medical centre only to be kidnapped by a couple of extremists in order to build a new, purer world. A story about strength, faith and the ability to create an alternate reality.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2025-06-07
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