Ryūsuke Hamaguchi: Last News

We open on a long, steady tracking shot through the woods, the camera peering upward through a thin tree canopy into a bright winter sky. Gently swung cymbal triplets trickle up from the ground, followed by a pristine electric guitar from above, and symphonic strings that seep in through the sides and slowly saturate the mix.

With four TV and film projects in as many years, few filmmakers right now are more prolific than Hirokazu Kore-eda. 

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist was awarded the Best Film award at the Asian Film Awards this evening in Hong Kong. Scroll down for the full list of winners. 

Christopher Vourlias Gordon Main’s apartheid-era documentary “London Recruits” has been tapped as the opening film at the sixth Joburg Film Festival, which takes place Feb. 27 – March 3 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The film sheds light on a pivotal moment in South Africa‘s history, when the struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa developed a new secret weapon.

Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest feature, Evil Does Not Exist, and the period action pic 12.12: The Day, from Korea, lead the nominations at this year’s Asian Film Awards. 

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Though the Red Sea Film Festival will feature a slew of films from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – including 11 feature films from Saudi Arabia – there is a rich roster of international fare set to launch locally from Jeddah. Kaleem Aftab, the festival’s director of international programming, says they received lots more submissions for this year’s third edition.

Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi has clinched the best film award in the main official competition of the 67th London Film Festival with his latest feature, Evil Does Not Exist. 

Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest feature, Evil Does Not Exist, leads this year’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) with four nods, including the gong for Best Film. 

The Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion has been given to a winner!

Total admissions to theatres at this year’s Venice Film Festival have hit 114,851, up 18% on last year, according to figures published by the Biennale this week, as the film event passes the midway point. 

Jessica Kiang A wild deer with a hunter’s bullet in its belly may attack a human, no matter how mild its nature normally. This is one of the droplets of woodland wisdom dispensed by the otherwise taciturn Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), the woodcutter, water-gatherer and all-round odd-job-man of Mizubiki village, the setting of “Drive My Car” director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s meditative and moving, yet ultimately unsettling new feature. Takumi’s few words all relate to such matters: the flow of a stream, the thorns on a Siberian Ginseng, the tang of wild wasabi.

When Venice head Alberto Barbera announced his competition lineup in July, he confessed that he and his selection team were surprised to see one submission in their database: a feature project by Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. 

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Evil Does Not Exist,” the new film by the Oscar-winning auteur Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, has sold to several additional territories. The film will world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, will have its North America premiere as a special presentation at Toronto, and will go on to screen at New York and San Sebastian. Hamaguchi received Oscar nominations last year for directing and adapted screenplay, shared with Takamasa Ôe, for “Drive My Car.” The film was also nominated in the best picture category and won the international feature film Oscar.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired all North American rights to Academy Award-winning Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist ahead of its world premiere in Competition at the Venice Film Festival next month.

Billie Eilish and Finneas, who won an Oscar for their James Bond theme earlier this year, have been invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.The Academy announced its complete list of 397 invitees to its board on Tuesday night (June 28). The 397 names include actors, directors, musicians, producers, film editors and more.It's time to announce our new members! Meet the Class of 2022.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Tuesday that it is inviting 397 artists and executives to join the Oscar organizer’s membership ranks. The prospective 2022 class includes 71 Oscar nominees and 15 winners, with 44% of the invitees women, and 37% of the group belongs to underrepresented communities.

EXCLUSIVE: Los Angeles-based Synepic Entertainment is launching Sakka, a streaming service specializing in Japanese cinema. The platform will debut in North America and select further territories in early May, the company said. At launch, it will feature five movies: Happy Hour, the 2015 movie from recent Oscar nominee Ryusuke Hamaguchi; Shô Miyake’s 2018 feature And Your Bird Can Sing; Seiji Tanaka’s 2018 film Melancholic; Chihiro Amano’s 2019 pic Mrs Noisy; and Hajime Tsuda’s 2020 drama Daughters. Synepic said it was focusing on independent films and would be acquiring two further titles later in the summer. The company is also looking to host in-person screenings of films it acquires. “We are beyond proud to create this unique platform for Japanese films of new generations,” commented Chiaki Yanagimoto, the president of Synepic Entertainment and the founder of the platform. “There are many Japanese films that unfortunately don’t see their full potential outside of Japan because of the traditional distribution system there. After the win of Drive My Car, several critics pointed out that the Japanese system is outdated and indifferent to the international market. It is time to change that narrative and find new ways to share these inspiring works coming from Japan, and create a platform that truly cares about the films and the filmmakers.”

Every year at the Cannes Film Festival there is a critics’ favorite. Last year, it was Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, a loose adaptation of three stories from Haruki Murakami’s 2014 compendium Men Without Women, that stars Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yūsuke Kafuku, an actor and theater director dealing with a tragic loss. Two years after the death of his playwright wife, Kafuku is invited by a theater festival to stage a multi-language production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, where he is assigned the taciturn chauffeur Misaki and meets the dangerous young actor Takatsuki. Though it only left Cannes with an award for Best Screenplay, Drive My Car went on to be the arthouse bulldozer of 2021, leading to a surprise three nominations—for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay—outside the expected Foreign Language Film nod. This interview took place shortly after Hamaguchi’s stint as juror at this year’s Berlinale…

Sasha Urban editorAs the pandemic raged and in-person screenings practically disappeared, the Academy’s Screening Room has found an appreciative audience.Many film distributors are able to send links to their films to various guilds, media members and voters; the Academy has stepped in with its screening room, offering voters those films plus other contenders who can’t afford to do that.With the Acad’s growing international membership, the website has been a boon, especially to those who submitted shorts, documentaries and international films.The website may also have helped international films such as “Parallel Mothers,” “The Worst Person in the World” and “Drive My Car” earn noms in other categories, such as original screenplay for “Worst” and three others for “Drive” (best picture, screenplay and director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi). Although there have been growing pains since its inception in 2015, the streaming room has found an appreciative audience among the 9,573 Oscar voters.“Our membership, especially internationally, was continuing to grow,” says Tom Oyer, senior VP of member relations and awards for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Jane Campion fought through tears last night accepting the Best Director award for The Power Of The Dog at the New York Film Critics Circle ceremony last night after a moving intro from Martin Scorsese.

Lady Gaga is the lady of the night at the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Awards!