21-05-2025
Adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel premieres at Cannes
Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, set in postwar Nagasaki and 1980s England, needed to be made into a film while there were still some of Japan's World War II generation alive to share their stories, director Kei Ishikawa says.
"The hurdles were high, but I felt strongly that if I had the chance to make the movie, I should do it now," Ishikawa says at the Cannes Film Festival, where "A Pale View of Hills" is competing in the Un Certain Regard category. The 78th edition of the film festival kicked off on May 13 and will conclude Saturday.
"In a few years' time, we might not be able to get to hear their stories, and that weighed heavily on me," says the Japanese director, whose 2022 film "A Man" premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
"A Pale View of Hills" intertwines the central character Etsuko's memories of life in Nagasaki after the atomic bombing in 1945 with her interactions with her daughter in 1980s Britain.
The film, which stars Suzu Hirose and Yoh Yoshida, premiered on May 16, with The Hollywood Reporter describing it as a Cannes hidden gem.
Ishiguro, an executive producer on the film, is also in Cannes. He says that adapting the novel, which he wrote when he was 25, was different from taking his other books, including "The Remains of the Day" and "Never Let Me Go," to the big screen.
"Not just because it's so very personal, but because at the time when I wrote the book, it was just 35 years after the end of the Second World II," the 70-year-old Japanese-born British author says.
Now there have been at least two generations since the one that experienced the war that ended 80 years ago, he adds.
"For me, that's a very special thing. Possibly this is the first time maybe the Japanese people are prepared to look carefully at those experiences," says Ishiguro.
He praises Ishikawa, 47, for making a film that was relevant to younger audiences from what he called an "apprentice book."
"He's made the movie really for today's audience, for his generation and the generation actually even younger than him," says Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.
Director Ishikawa says he hopes the film would also alter foreign perceptions of Japanese women, who "are often seen as demure, walking a step behind their husbands."
But that's not the case at all, he says.
"There were definitely such strong women in that era," he says. "We've made this film from our own lived experiences and I believe that if many people see it, it could really refresh the image of Japan itself."
