The director of “Still Walking” and “Nobody Knows” is embarking on a series airing in January

Japan’s film industry, underfunded and “inward-facing”, no longer attracts young talent, regrets director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who has collaborated with young directors on an upcoming series on Netflix .

The 60-year-old filmmaker, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018 for A Family Affair, believes that the smug attitudes and harsh working conditions in the local audiovisual industry prevent Japanese productions from meeting the same success abroad. foreign than South Korean works.

“Our creative environment needs to change,” Kore-eda said in an interview with AFP, pointing to the low salaries, long hours and uncertainties about the future that newcomers face.

“Throughout my career, I’ve been able to focus on perfecting my craft. But looking around me, I see that young people no longer choose to work in cinema or television. »

To bring his stone to the building, the director of Still Walking and Nobody Knows has chosen to collaborate with three young directors on a series to be broadcast in January on the Netflix streaming platform.

“It’s more like me who stole things from them”, jokes Kore-eda, praising the qualities of his young colleagues and their “much better knowledge of the material” than his own.

Called Makanai: in the maiko kitchen, this nine-episode production adapted from a manga takes place in Kyoto (western Japan) in the community of apprentice geishas.

Japanese animation is appreciated all over the world, but films and series produced in the archipelago struggle to exist abroad, compared to South Korean hits like the Squid Game series or Parasite by Bong Joon-ho, first feature -foreign language film to receive the Oscar for best film in 2020.

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda poses during a photoshoot on December 9, 2022, in Tokyo. Philip Fong/afp.com

Local market

The South Korean government has spared no expense in supporting its audiovisual industry, enabling the creation of numerous worldwide hits over the past two decades, but “meanwhile, Japan was looking inward” because the local market was enough for him, observes Kore-eda.

“That’s why there is such a gap” between the two countries, thinks the filmmaker, who himself recently chose to exercise his talent outside the archipelago.

Filming La Vérité (2019) in France with Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche and Les Bonnes étoiles (2022), a South Korean film about child trafficking, allowed him to better understand the shortcomings of Japanese cinema, he explains. he.

Kore-eda and other Japanese directors called this year for the creation of a local equivalent of the Center National du Cinéma (CNC) in France to improve funding for audiovisual creation and working conditions.

According to a 2019 Japanese government poll, two-thirds of Japanese film workers were unhappy with their pay and long hours, and worried about the future of the industry.

“The filmmakers of my generation, and myself, we are resigned to the fact that we can no longer live only from our films”, says Hiroshi Okuyama, 26, one of the directors who participated in the new Netflix series .

Hirokazu Kore-eda and other filmmakers were also publicly outraged earlier this year after allegations of sexual assault by several actresses against a Japanese director.

Their calls to fight bullying, in a country that has hardly been won over by the #MeToo movement that started in Hollywood in 2017, prompted the Japanese directors’ union to take action against bullying, “a big step in before,” says Kore-eda.

However, he calls for going further, in particular by putting in place protections so that victims can testify, and regrets that sexual harassment in Japan is still “considered as a problem of people, whereas it should be approached as a structural problem.

Asked about his next projects, Kore-eda says he wants to look into the issues of immigration and abandonment, and work on “an epic”. “There are too many things I want to do,” he said.

Tomohiro OSAKI/AFP.