My desire to make a film always starts with a personal event that leaves its mark on me and that I want to translate into images. I create fictions from very personal things… I didn’t come into filmmaking from, as you say, watching other films and then wanting to be a director. Fundamentally, it was my love of the medium of film as a tool to capture the moment, the moment that’s happening right now. When film was first invented, there was that excitement about its ability to capture a moment in time, the here and the now. And that’s really the starting point for my interest in the film medium.

—Naomi Kawase