Awarded the Silver Lion for best director at this year’s Venice International Film Festival for his suspense drama “Wife of a Spy,” Kiyoshi Kurosawa could get the sort of career boost that helped make the previous Japanese recipient of the prize, Takeshi Kitano, an internationally recognized auteur. (Though Kitano got a bigger leg up for his 1997 Venice Golden Lion winner “Hana-bi” than his 2003 Silver Lion awardee “Zatoichi.”)
Kurosawa's three-decade career has certainly been a brilliant run, but in terms of his reputation abroad, he’s long been a step behind Kitano and Hirokazu Kore-eda, winner of Cannes Palme d’Or — the festival world’s ultimate prize — for his 2018 film “Shoplifters.”
Kurosawa has arguably been more thematically and even geographically adventurous, though, venturing far from his horror-genre comfort zone to make the 2019 road movie “To the Ends of the Earth” in Uzbekistan.