Naoko Ogigami

Early life and education

Ogigami attended Chiba University's Image Science program. After graduating in 1994, she moved to the United States to study film at the University of Southern California. There she studied for six years, learning English and completing a graduate degree in film production. In 2000, she returned to Japan and later began writing and directing films.

Career

While living in the United States, Ogigami worked on several short films, television shows, and commercials as a cinematographer, camera operator, and production assistant. She also wrote and directed two short films, Ayako (1999) and Hoshino-kun, Yumino-kun (2001). Yumino-kun won 3 different awards at the PIA Film Festival the year it premiered. Her first feature film, Yoshino's Barber Shop premiered at the PIA Film Festival in and the Berlin International Film Festival in 2004 winning awards at both. Her next feature film, Love is Five, Seven, Five! was released a year later in 2005. In 2006 her third film Kamome Diner was given a limited release in Japan. It would later go on to tour a number of festivals, and was awarded the 5th Best Film at the Yokohama Film Festival in 2007.

In 2008 Glasses, her fourth film, was featured at the Berlin International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and San Francisco International Film Festival, though it first premiered a year earlier. At the Berlin International Film Festival, Glasses was nominated for and won the Manfred Salzgeber Award for "broadening the boundaries of cinema today." The film was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic World Cinema, though it lost to Jens Jonssen's The King of Ping Pong.

In 2008, she also helped found the production company Suurkiitos, which is the Finnish word for "thank you very much." The company handles advertising, actor management, and film distribution. Her two subsequent films were distributed through the company. After a break in writing and directing, her next film Toilet was given limited theatrical release in Japan and South Korea in 2010, and went on to tour the festival circuit, being shown in festivals in Canada, the United States, Japan, and Taiwan. Her most recent film, Rent-a-Cat, premiered in 2012 at the Stockholm International Film Festival, and was later nominated for Best Feature at Oslo Films From The South Festival.

Style

Ogigami has written and directed all of her films, which have been classified as "iyashi-kei eiga," or, "films that provide emotional healing." Thematically, all of her films are similar in nature, a recurring theme being culture clash; foreigner comes to a new place and is faced with unfamiliar practices and elements. The films then depict how they deal with this clash. Ogigami's films are lighter in nature than most Japanese cinema. When asked about one of the practices characters participate in with Glasses, she commented, "Somehow Glasses went to lots of film festivals. And especially European and American people think that twilighting means something about Zen spirit, like in Buddhism. But I always answered that maybe this is just because I grew up in Japan and I have those kind of things in my mind..."

Filmography