Director Nobuhiko Obayashi

“Movies can’t change history, but they can change the future of the history” – Nobuhiko Obayashi

Movie Director Nobuhiko Obayashi 大林宣彦 (1938-2020)

Although the Director was known to the world for the Onomichi Three-Part Film, Obayashi could not help but think that he had not fulfilled the promise he made to Master Director Kurosawa 30 years ago.

Akira Kurosawa expected him to tell the horrors of the war.  However, he knew that making war movies was too difficult in Japan.  

The turning point came at the time of the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake. He then realized that the current politicians and economic leaders now were younger than him and had not experienced the war. 

So, for his next project, he was conscious of a younger generation. He believed that technology development, advanced civilization and economic power would not make them happy.

He said, ”It is the audience that makes the happy ending” then concluded, “It is the young people who create a future without war.” 

VIFF Gateway: Obayashi’s Tragedies of Youth trilogy (July 9 ~ August 19, 2021)

Seven Weeks 野のなななのか

The film examines such issues as Japan’s wartime responsibility, the current nuclear fallout issue, and romance. The director, Nobuhiko Obayashi, has referred to the film as “Guernica in moving images.”The film’s story follows the funeral of an old man and his family members who meet to discuss his death. Much of the film focuses on flashbacks to his youth, and covers the history of the town during the 1930s. The film crisscrosses the stories of a dozen different characters, from different decades. (2014, 171 min, 19+, in Japanese with English subtitles)

Casting Blossoms to the Sky この空の花 長岡花火物語

Endo Reiko is a journalist who was assigned to comment on the aftermath of the earthquake in Tohoku. During the visit, she is approached by her former boyfriend, Kenichi, who asks her to join the local play which took place in the city during the Second World War. Endo then learns how the region Nagaoka was destroyed during the war. (2012, 160 min, 19+, in Japanese with English subtitles)

Hanagatami 花筐

In the spring of 1941, sixteen-year-old Toshihiko leaves Amsterdam to attend school in Karatsu, a small town on the western coast of Japan, where his aunt Keiko cares for his cousin Mina. Immersed in the seaside’s nature and culture, Toshihiko soon befriends the town’s other extraordinary adolescents as they all contend with the war’s inescapable gravitational pull. Director Obayashi commented that any amount of CGI would never compare to the lived experience of war.  The movie was invited by Rotterdam International Film Festival and was ranked #2 of the year by Japan’s Kinema Junpo magazine.  (2017, 169 min, 19+, in Japanese with English subtitles)