Novelist Maha Harada Debuts as Director at San Sebastian — SkimNews
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- Maha Harada, a 64-year-old bestselling Japanese author, debuts as a feature film director with "In My Father's Room," adapted from her short story "An Unnecessary Man," which competes at San Sebastian before screening at Busan.
- Bitters End has already sold the film to France, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong ahead of both festivals, with more territories under discussion.
- The story follows Satomi, an art museum worker who learns almost nothing about her father Yuichi until after he dies alone; Harada says the character grew directly from her own father, who sold art books and introduced her to Picasso at age 10 and "Gone with the Wind" at 12.
- Harada built the film around two visual anchors — the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) and a Mark Rothko painting — noting Japanese museums collectively hold 10 Rothko works, acquired by curators decades before his prices climbed.
- After her assistant director told her the script had "too much stage direction," Harada trimmed it twice on set, paring dialogue down to very little; she singles out lead Aoi's tap-running moment as one where "despair" came through "almost nothing at all."
- Cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa (whose earlier credits include "Evil Does Not Exist") shaped the film's look alongside Harada, with Yasujiro Ozu and Victor Erice's "The Spirit of the Beehive" cited as tonal touchstones and Kei Kumai's "Death of a Tea Master" as a specific visual reference for the tea ceremony.
- Harada says reaching audiences outside Japan has been the hardest part of her writing career despite her novels finding readers in South Korea, China, and Taiwan, and frames entering film at 64 as partly about proving age shouldn't limit ambition.
Why it matters: A novelist whose books couldn't penetrate foreign markets is using cinema — not translation — as her international bridge, with distribution locked into four Asian and European territories before the first festival screening. The film is built around two specifically Japanese visual anchors (chanoyu and Rothko's spiritual reception in Japan) presented as universal touchstones, a positioning that gives the project a distinctive exportable identity rather than a generic arthouse profile.
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