The red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival could be graced by more Japanese if the government and the film industry were to cooperate in a more substantiative way, suggests director Naomi Kawase, this year's winner of the Grand Prix for her film "Mogari no Mori (The Mourning Forest)."
"What I really desire, not only for myself but for the entire Japanese film industry," Kawase told a press luncheon last week, "is to have some kind of system in place where it is fairly easy to ensure that Japanese films are distributed abroad in a very systematic way."
Though "The Mourning Forest" was aided in production and subtitling costs by the government-run Agency for Cultural Affairs, whose annual film budget is 2.2 billion, Kawase would like to see more than just money.