Asa ga Kuru / Comes Morning
A director whose international prestige has been orchestrated primarily through her repeated appearances at the Cannes film festival (where she more often than not competes), Japan’s Naomi Kawase is already at work on her latest project, Comes Morning. Kawase won the Golden Camera at Cannes for her 1997 debut Suzaku, then competing in 2003 with Shara, 2007 with The Mourning Forest (winner of the Grand Jury Prize), 2011 with Hanezu, 2014 with Still the Water, and 2017 with Radiance (winner of the Ecumenical Jury Prize). Her 2015 title An notably opened Un Certain Regard. Strangely, Kawase’s break from her intimate melodramas with 2018’s Vision (featuring Juliette Binoche) opened locally in Japan before receiving it’s international premiere at TIFF to less fanfare than usual (even as it’s Kawase’s most unpredictable and narratively daring venture to date). Her latest is produced by Yumiko Takebe (Radiance).
Gist: Kawase adapts Mizuki Tsuijmura’s 2015 bestselling novel about a couple whose painful experiences with fertility treatment leads them to adoption. Six years after raising their child, Hikari, a woman posing as the biological mother, attempts to extort them.
Release Date/Prediction: Filmed in April of 2019, and in post-production as of August, we expect Kawase to be invited to the Cannes Main Competition for the sixth time in May of 2020.
 |
 |
