It’s the Chicago International Film Festival’s 60th birthday this year, and they’ve returned in full force with an incredible lineup of films for 2024. With more than 120 feature films and 70 short films from all around the world, everyone attending is sure to find something exciting and moving to watch. One of the highlights from this year’s festival is the in-person tribute and retrospective screenings to one of the master filmmakers working today: Kore-eda Hirokazu. Born in 1962 in Tokyo, Japan, Kore-eda has been a working filmmaker for more than 30 years. His feature directorial debut Maborosi (1995) won the Venice International Film Festival’s Golden Osella and the Chicago International Film Festival’s Gold Hugo Award. Throughout the 90’s and the 21st century, Kore-eda has continued to turn heads with empathetic and heart wrenching films that capture authentic depictions of people commonly on the margins of society, and has made a name for himself for being able to bring out incredible performances from young child actors. This year, 6 of his films are being screened: After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004), Like Father, Like Son (2013), After the Storm (2016), Shoplifters (2018), and Broker (2022). Nobody Knows was presented in 35mm and was also where Kore-eda received a Career Achievement Award, a special event that I feel truly honored to have attended.

Upon receiving his award, Kore-eda gave a speech saying that despite being a working director for over 30 years, he still feels as though he has so much more he wants to do. Upon reflecting on his older films, which he’s now been revisiting with CIFF’s retrospective series, there are a lot of things he said he would’ve done differently. Kore-eda joked that hopefully after 30 more years he’ll be able to do more and then receive yet another award, to which a programmer at CIFF responded by saying that by that point he’ll be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Chicago International Film Festival has had a longstanding relationship with Kore-eda, and has brought many of his films to U.S. audiences for decades. This began in 1995 with his feature debut Maborosi, which one CIFF’s Gold Hugo Award. Most recently, Kore-eda’s Monster (2023) won the Festival’s Gold Q-Hugo in last year’s competition. I myself was first introduced to Kore-eda’s work in 2018 when I saw Shoplifters at the 54th Chicago International Film Festival. A film that rendered me speechless and in tears, he has since become one of my favorite filmmakers working today, and I am immensely grateful for his work and to CIFF for creating the space that allowed me to experience his work at all.

With all that in mind, here are my thoughts on 2 of the retrospective screenings of Kore-eda’s films that I attended, and a bonus review of Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) which I also had the pleasure of seeing this past week at CIFF.

After the Storm (2016)

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

In a Q&A following the screening of this film, Kore-eda thanked the audience for watching it, saying: "It made me so happy to see people laughing. It made me feel like people really understood the film even more than when they cry at my films." After the Storm tells the story of Ryota, an unpopular writer currently working as a private detective who is also a deadbeat dad with a gambling problem. As a typhoon is passing through Japan, Ryota, along with his ex-wife and 11 year old son, are trapped in an apartment together as they wait out the storm. Together, the fractured family must reckon with their past as they look toward what their uncertain future might look like.

While After the Storm certainly might make you cry as many of Kore-eda’s films do, it is also one of his funniest films. The conversations are lively and wondrous, filled with all of the depth and variation of a swirling sea. Kore-eda is truly a humanist through and through. There is incredible character work on display here, as every line of dialogue peels back each character layer by layer, allowing you to truly see them for who they are in their full complicated glory. Ryota is a deeply complex character, troubled by his past and the way his father raised him, while also failing to recognize how he has allowed history to repeat itself with his own son. What’s clear in After the Storm is that sometimes even when people try their best, it can be difficult to make things whole again. Nothing can ever truly go back to the way they once were, but perhaps we can move forward together as the sun rises on a new day. People are doing all they can in the present, even when they naively focus too much on the past or the future.

Nobody Knows (2004)

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

Director of Aftersun Charlotte Wells once said, while visiting the Criterion Closet, that she likes her cinema devastating. I can’t think of a more apt adjective to describe Kore-eda’s work: devastating. Nobody Knows is no exception. The 2004 film tells the story of a young boy and his three siblings who must figure out how to get by and survive on their own after their mother leaves them and shows no signs of returning. The twelve year old is Akira, who finds himself in this predicament as he is left in charge with no money and no parental support. It is a simultaneously heartfelt and heartbreaking drama, capturing how children are able find both freedom and misfortune in a world that often chooses to ignore those who need help.

Oh what do you do when you wake up every day and realize you will never be loved in the way that you need and at the same time you're so desperately needed by those around you? You can try to water every plant on the veranda, but at some point something has to give (there's only so much you can give) and someone is going to end up without nourishment and wither away. Parental absence in Nobody Knows is a boulder thrown into a dilapidated apartment and children are the ones who have to bear the carnage. How could you expect them to handle something like this? They're only children, freshly born and clumsy. They couldn't possibly find a way to take care of themselves, to be able to memorialize what will later transpire. Still though, they find a way to be there for each other, possibly only out of necessity. No one else is there and willing to do the hard and messy work of loving them. They escape into the outside world together, and in that overwhelming and treacherous place they will not only find fear and cruelty, but connection and freedom. 

Sometimes the people you want to love you will crush you, but maybe you can still create a place for others where they can watch the airplanes fly overhead.

Dahomey (2024)

Director: Mati Diop

In 2021, the Republic of Benin, formerly Dahomey, convinced France to return 26 artifacts looted by French colonizers over a hundred years ago. The artifacts, once held in the Musée du Quai de Branly in Paris, were sent back to Benin. Dahomey is an imaginative and surreal documentary that serves as a record of the return of these 26 stolen artifacts to their rightful home, and the complicated way in which the people living there receive them. Conveyed in an incredible fly on the wall style, Mati Diop is interested in exploring the difficulties in untangling yourself from history and colonialism, and how a culture is transported through time and space in material and immaterial ways. I was incredibly captivated by the style in which this story was presented, and the way these artifacts and thus history itself was given voice. As the world changes in either small or big ways, it is up to us both as individuals and as a community to negotiate how we want to move through cultural and political events, otherwise things might be decided for us.

That’s all for this first dispatch from the Chicago International Film Festival. I have 2 more dispatches planned as I continue to watch the remaining films on my list throughout this upcoming week. Thank you for reading, and stay tuned later this week for more coverage from CIFF’s 60th birthday!