Daisuke Tengan is an acclaimed filmmaker, but search for him on the Internet and the first thing you'll discover is that he's the son of director Shohei Imamura, who won the Palme d' Or at the Cannes Film Festival for "Narayamabushiko" in 1983 and "Unagi" in 1997.
Tengan had " no particular wish" to follow in the footsteps of his father, who died last year at age 79, and after graduating from Ryukyu University in Okinawa worked for the publisher Shincho-sha. But it was as if fate was drawing him toward film, first as a writer and then as a director — though he was determined not to use his family ties and adopted the pen name Tengan, a common family name in Okinawa that means "wishing to heaven."
Now aged 47 and known for films that explore the lives of the disadvantaged, such as 2002's "Aiki" about a handicapped boy's passion for martial arts, Tengan is making his theater debut with Yasmina Reza's 2004 "A Spanish Play." Speaking between rehearsals, Tengan talked about the challenge of staging this French play-within-a-play, the revival of the Japanese movie industry and the social role of drama.