Born in 1955 in Kobe, Japan, he is one of the most brilliant directors of the new Japanese Cinema coming from the so-called “8mm School” – as directors Hideo Nakata and Shinya Tsukamoto – after the “Japanese New Wave” of the 1960s and 1970s – with Shohei Imamura or Nagisa Oshima. As a sociology student at Rikkyô University in Tokyo, influenced by the Hollywood genre cinema of the 1970s, he directed the medium-length film Vertigo College awarded at the 1980 PIA Film Festival in Tokyo. He then spent the next few years working as assistant director with Kazuhiko Hasegawa and Shinji Sômai.
In 1983, he was hired at the studio Nikkatsu and directed his first feature film, the sulfurous Kandagawa Wars and two years later shot The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl. As Nikkatsu decided not to release the film theatrically, he had to return to Rikkyô University as a then-thirty-year-old professor. He will influence many young Japanese directors such as Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge, 2004) or Shinji Aoyama (Eureka, 2000).
In 1988, he went back on film sets and shot his first thriller, Sweet Home, and then worked for television in the middle of the 1990s by making six successful episodes of the Japanese TV show Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself.
His following feature films were selected and awarded on the international film festival circuit : in 1997, Cure at Tokyo and later Yokohama with its award for Best Director; License to Live at Berlin in 1998; Charisma at the 1999 Directors’ Fortnight; Barren Illusions at Venice in 1999; Pulse at the Un Certain Regard section of the 2001 Festival de Cannes and winner of the Critics’ Prize; Bright Future in Competition at the 2003 Festival de Cannes; Doppelgänger as the 2003 Busan Film Festival’s Opening film; Retribution at the 2006 Venice Film Festival; Tokyo Sonata at Un Certain Regard in 2008 and again the recipient of the Jury Prize.
In 2012, Kiyoshi Kurosawa wrote and directed all the episodes of the Japanese mystery TV series Penance which was released theatrically in numerous countries, including France, and where four elementary school students witness the murder of one of her fellow students. The following year, he made the SF fantasy puzzle Real, followed by the ghost story Journey to the Shore, presented at Un Certain Regard in 2015 where the filmmaker won the Best Director Award.
After Creepy and Daguerrotype in 2016, two mysterious investigation films whose second one was shot in France, Kiyoshi Kurosawa worked on the ghosts of war crimes in Japan through a spy story with Wife of a Spy, winner of the Silver Lion at the 2020 Venice Film Festival. His two new films will be released this year in France: Serpent’s Path and Cloud, the Japanese submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and presented this year at Reims Polar.
