Masato Harada – Sekigahara #NYAFF2018

July 8, 2018

Masato Harada - Sekigahara #NYAFF2018 fredfilmradio

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PODCAST | Samantha Sartori interviews Masato Harada, director of the film Sekigahara.

We met Masato Harada at the New York Asian Film Festival 2018, where three movies of the Japanese Master have been shown: his big hit Kamikaze Taxi, the most recent Kakekomi, and Sekigahara. Mr. Harada received the Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to Asian Cinema. We had the great honor and pleasure to met Mr. Harada and we talked about the importance of the battle of Sekigahara in Japanese history and how he wrote the script for this complex story based on the famous novel Sekigahara by Ryōtarō Shiba. Mr. Harada is a movie buff with 360-degree knowledge of cinema, and it was a real pleasure to talk about every aspect of Sekigahara, and where he found the surprising inspiration for the structure of this epic and astonishing movie. We also discuss the making of the subtitles, which is a very challenging problem in such a complex story. Sakigahara won Best Cinematography, Best Sound and Best Lightning at the Awards of the Japanese Academy. The movie is visually astonishing and, unbelievably, was made with a budget of only 9 million dollars! Mr. Harada’s mission in movie-making is to grant justice to all the women and men who have been unfairly mistreated, persecuted or oppressed by history. We finally talk about Killing for the Prosecution, his final movie, which will open August 24th in Japan.

Sekigahara: Sekigahara was a one-day battle in 1600 AD which left more than 30,000 lives on the field. The movie depicts the lives of Mitsunari Ishida and all the protagonists of this battle with a richness of detail, capturing the Japanese culture in scenes of political intrigue and an enigmatic story of cups of tea. We finish with a sense of deja vu, where the person who championed the people lost against political opportunism.

Discover more about the film here.