The most-recognisable Japanese director of the post-Ozu generation. The Palme d'Or-winning chronicler of contemporary Japanese family life.
Hirokazu Kore-eda began as a television documentary director before transitioning to narrative film in the 1990s. His first feature, Maborosi (1995), established the contemplative tonal register that has defined his subsequent work. His major works include Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), Like Father, Like Son (2013), Our Little Sister (2015), Shoplifters (2018, Palme d'Or winner), Broker (2022, Korean-language), and Monster (2023).
Kore-eda's filmography is the most-internationally-recognised contemporary Japanese work in cinema. His Palme d'Or for Shoplifters in 2018 was the first Japanese-language film to win the prize since Shohei Imamura's Eel in 1997. His commercial reach has been modest but consistent — most of his films receive significant international art-house distribution and major festival recognition.
He is the working director most-often compared to Yasujiro Ozu. The comparison is partially structural (both directors specialise in contemporary Japanese family drama) and partially aesthetic (both work at a slower-than-Hollywood pacing, with restrained camera movement and naturalistic performances). Kore-eda has, across multiple interviews, expressed some discomfort with the comparison; he has pointed to Ken Loach and Edward Yang as more-direct influences than Ozu. The audience and critical reception have nonetheless persisted in the Ozu comparison.
Almost every Kore-eda film is, at its core, a family drama. The families are typically working-class or lower-middle-class urban Japanese; the dramatic stakes are typically domestic rather than plot-driven; the conflicts are typically interpersonal and emotional rather than physical or external. Shoplifters (2018) is about a constructed family of unrelated people living together in a Tokyo apartment. Like Father, Like Son (2013) is about two families learning that their six-year-old sons were switched at birth. Our Little Sister (2015) is about three sisters and their newly-discovered half-sister. Nobody Knows (2004) is about four children abandoned by their mother in a Tokyo apartment.
What makes Kore-eda's family work distinctive is the patience of his observation. The films do not, as a rule, build to dramatic climactic confrontations. They observe what families actually do — the meals, the shared routines, the small kindnesses, the accumulated resentments — and let the dramatic substance emerge from the specificity of the observation. This is the structural feature that critics most often cite when comparing him to Ozu, and Kore-eda's discomfort with the comparison does not invalidate it.
Kore-eda has, across his career, worked extensively with non-professional and child actors. The four children in Nobody Knows are all non-professionals (the eldest, Yuya Yagira, won Best Actor at Cannes for his performance, at 14, becoming the youngest winner in the category's history). The young leads in Like Father, Like Son and Monster are similarly non-professional. The technique requires careful preparatory work — Kore-eda has spoken about extended pre-production time spent simply observing how children naturally behave in domestic environments before any scene is constructed.
What this produces is a register of child performance that conventional film-acting training tends to flatten. Kore-eda's children behave like actual children — with the specific physical comportment, attention spans, and emotional registers that real children of the depicted ages actually have. The films are, in this sense, the closest contemporary cinema has come to a sustained tradition of accurate child performance.
Kore-eda's late work has increasingly involved international collaborations. The Truth (2019) was shot in France with Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche. Broker (2022) was shot in South Korea in Korean, with Korean cast including Song Kang-ho. Monster (2023) returned to Japanese-language production. The international films have received mixed reception; the consensus is that the Japanese-set films remain his strongest work.
The pattern reflects a broader trend in international art cinema. Directors who have established themselves in their national tradition increasingly find themselves invited to make co-productions in other languages. The results have been uneven across multiple directors (Ang Lee's Hulk, Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights). Kore-eda has navigated the transition with more consistency than most.
If you've never watched a Kore-eda film:
Ken Loach, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Italian neorealism, and the Japanese television-documentary tradition Kore-eda came up in.