Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-Eda, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Shoplifters in 2018, is working on a new feature titled Monster ahead of a planned release in 2023.
Japan’s Gaga Corporation revealed that the film is in post-production and is set for a theatrical release in Japan on June 2, 2023, co-distributed with Toho.
It marks Kore-eda’s first film to be made in Japan since Shoplifters, having directed 2019 French feature The Truth and 2022 Korean film Broker in the interim.
The cast and story for Monster remains under wraps but was scripted by Yuji Sakamoto, a TV writer whose shows include Mother, The Best Divorce and A Woman, and Nobuhiro Doi’s hit romantic feature I Fell in Love Like a Flower Bouquet.
It is only Kore-eda’s second film to be scripted by another writer since his 1995 debut drama Maborosi, which screenwriter Yoshihisa Ogita adapted from a novel by Teru Miyamoto.
The lead producer is Genki Kawamura, who recently won best director at San Sebastian with his debut A Hundred Flowers. As a producer, Kawamura’s credits include Tetsuya Nakashima’s Confessions, Lee Sang-il’s Villain and Makoto Shinkai’s hit animated features Your Name, Weathering With You and Suzume. He also worked with Kore-eda on upcoming Netflix series The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House.
Also producing is Kenji Yamada and production partners on the feature are Toho, Gaga, Fuji Television Network, AOI Pro and Kore-eda’s company Bun-Buku.
Kore-Eda has been a regular at Cannes for more than 20 years with titles including Distance, Nobody Knows and jury prize winner Like Father, Like Son as well as Our Little Sister, Shoplifters and Broker – all of which played in Competition. A summer release date for Monster suggests a possible return to the Croisette for the filmmaker in 2023.
No comments yet