Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof & Japanese-Korean Filmmaker Mipo O To Receive Kurosawa Akira Award At Tokyo Film Festival — SkimNews
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- Tokyo International Film Festival announced that Mipo O and Mohammad Rasoulof will receive the Kurosawa Akira Award, recognizing auteurs expected to "help guide the industry's future."
- Mipo O won Best Director at Montreal World Film Festival with her 2014 film The Light Shines Only There, which collected 60 awards, and returned to feature filmmaking in 2024 with Living In Two Worlds after a hiatus for childcare.
- Mohammad Rasoulof has faced censorship, prison sentences, and filmmaking bans from the Iranian government yet won the Golden Bear at Berlinale 2020 for There Is No Evil and the Special Jury Prize at Cannes 2024 for The Seed Of The Sacred Fig.
- TIFF's selection committee — comprising Lee Sang-il, Yoji Yamada, Akiko Ashizawa, and Programming Director Shozo Ichiyama — praised Rasoulof for portraying "even those who perpetrate oppression as ordinary citizens" and Mipo O for works centered on people "living on the margins of society."
- The festival will also screen Kurosawa's favorite films including Chaplin's The Circus (1928) and Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? (1987), alongside 4K restorations of Sanshiro Sugata (1943) and Ikiru (1952).
- Actor Hayato Isomura will head the Ethical Film Award Jury, which this year selected three titles from Brazil, Germany/Ukraine, and Australia.
Why it matters: The committee's decision to honor Rasoulof — who has been imprisoned and banned by the Iranian government — alongside Mipo O, who returned after a decade-long hiatus to box-office success, positions TIFF as a festival that simultaneously champions dissident cinema and re-energized Asian auteurs, while its parallel Kurosawa retrospective ties this year's awards to the festival's namesake legacy.
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