Throughout her career, filmmaker Naomi Kawase has seldom strayed far from the subject she knows best: herself. Her earliest films were intimate documentaries about her family, shot on 8mm film. When she branched out into drama, the stories ¡ª usually set in her native Nara Prefecture ¡ª were often tightly entwined with her own.
That¡¯s also the case with her latest movie, ¡°True Mothers.¡± Based on a hit novel by Mizuki Tsujimura, it¡¯s a drama that looks at the issue of adoption from two sides, telling the parallel stories of a middle-aged couple with an adopted son, and a birth mother trying to get her child back.
When I meet Kawase for an early lunch at a macrobiotic cafe in Tokyo, I begin by telling her that my cousin in the U.K. recently adopted a child himself.
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