Hirokazu Kore-eda films the families Japan pretends don’t exist

Hirokazu Kore-eda

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 6, 1962 Nerima, Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Shoplifters, Monster, Nobody Knows
Awards	Venice Film Festival Golden Osella · Cannes Film Festival Best Actor 2004 (Yuya Yagira in Nobody Knows) · Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize 2013 · Palme d'Or · Academy Award · Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay 2023 · Cannes Film Festival Queer Palm 2023 · 2nd Takanawa Gateway City Award at SSFF & Asia 2026

There is a scene near the end of Shoplifters where a woman being interrogated by police is asked whether what she had with her companions was a real family. The film doesn’t cut away. It lets the question hang in the air, unanswered, while the camera stays on her face. Hirokazu Kore-eda builds his cinema out of that refusal — the refusal to deliver the verdict the narrative seems to require. His camera watches without judging, and that watching is, finally, the argument.

He was born in Nerima, in the northwest of Tokyo, the youngest of three children. His mother watched films constantly on television, and he watched with her — not as future training but as a shared domestic ritual, one of those small household habits his own films would later record with such precision. After failing his first university entrance exams, he enrolled at Waseda University a year later, in the literature faculty, intending to become a novelist. The degree in letters led him, via the path many Japanese filmmakers of his generation took, to T.V. Man Union, one of the country’s principal documentary production companies, where he spent most of the late 1980s and early 1990s directing programs about death, memory, and social invisibility — subjects that never quite left him.

His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), about a young woman undone by a suicide she cannot explain, went to Venice and won the Golden Osella for cinematography. It announced what would become his signature: a camera that holds still while characters move through grief, with no orchestra telling you what to feel. After Life (1998) asked what memory a person would choose to keep forever. Neither film was commercially aggressive. Both established the terms of everything that followed.

Nobody Knows (2004) arrived from a real news story — four children abandoned by their mother in a Tokyo apartment, hidden from the landlord for months — and sent a twelve-year-old actor home from Cannes with Best Actor. The film spent two and a half hours inside that apartment without resolving into polemic. Still Walking (2008) trapped a family inside the annual ritual of a dead son’s memorial day and watched resentment accumulate in the gaps between what people say and what they mean. Like Father, Like Son (2013) placed two families undone by a hospital baby-switch and asked which of the two lives should matter more to a child; the Jury Prize it won at Cannes was the institution formally acknowledging that the question was being asked seriously.

Shoplifters (2018) made the international equation explicit. A group of strangers — older couple, adult daughter, small girl, adolescent boy — living as a family while shoplifting for survival were simultaneously Tokyo’s invisible economy and a rebuke to any notion that blood or paperwork defines kinship. The Palme d’Or at Cannes confirmed Kore-eda as the central figure in contemporary Japanese cinema. The Academy Award nomination followed. So did the recognition that his position — filmmaker of the overlooked in a country that tends not to look at them — had been formalized by the institutions most invested in looking the other way.

Not every film in that run lands with equal force. The Truth (2019), made in France and starring Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche as mother and daughter, applied his domestic observation to the world of the French film industry — with careful, competent, finally inert results. Broker (2022), shot in South Korea and built around illegal baby brokers and an abandoned newborn, drew similar reactions: technically accomplished, emotionally present, somehow missing the sharp internal logic that powers Nobody Knows or Shoplifters. Critics who love the early Kore-eda sometimes argue that what makes those films work — a rootedness in specific Japanese interior spaces, the tatami rooms, the narrow kitchens, the family meals that communicate mostly through what isn’t said — doesn’t travel easily. Monster (2023) brought him back to Japan and to something sharper: a Rashomon-structured school drama that received Cannes’s Best Screenplay award and the Queer Palm.

Sheep in the Box, which premiered at Cannes in May 2026, is his first science-fiction film — a drama about a bereaved couple who receive an android replica of their dead son from a company that specialises in building AI replicas of lost loved ones. The reviews were divided: some found it a moving extension of his lifelong preoccupation with chosen and constructed family; others described it as emotionally stunted, a film whose restraint worked against the scale of its subject. The tension between those two readings is itself a version of the argument Kore-eda has been making since Maborosi: that the camera which refuses to tell you how to feel is the most honest one available, even when you wish it would.

He married in 2002 and has a daughter born in 2007. Still Walking, made in 2008, drew openly from his experience of losing his mother during production. He is one of the few major directors whose relationship to domesticity is professional as well as personal — which may be why his films about grief and family obligation feel sourced rather than imagined.

Look Back, his live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s 2021 coming-of-age manga about two girls determined to become manga artists, arrives in late 2026. Fujimoto’s source material is already one of the best-selling single-chapter manga publications in recent memory, and the adaptation will carry commercial and cultural weight along with a question Kore-eda has always known how to hold without forcing an answer: what keeps someone making things when no one has told them yet whether what they’re making is worth anything.