Yurina Kaneko, “The Daughter of a Famous Film Director Is Also a Film Director

I want to use film to express something that cannot be put into words.

My father is a film director, so movies have been a part of my life since I was a child. I watched my father working, and it was our family tradition to go to the Odaiba multiplex on weekends to see movies.

That was our family tradition.” Yurina Kaneko, 26, is a film director. Her father is Shusuke Kaneko, 66, a film director who worked on the “Gamera” series and “Death Note. Her works, which have often won awards in independent film competitions, have a unique worldview.

She says, “I make films with the feeling that I am filming a landscape with people in it, rather than just people themselves. In the film “Sleeping Insects,” I created a device that makes the audience listen to the conversations of the bus passengers, and I directed the film in such a way that the conversations provide clues to the story that follows. The film is interspersed here and there with sounds and voices that you can barely hear if you listen carefully. I want to express in the film what cannot be put into words, including the situation and scenery where the main character is.”

Of all the visual media, he is particularly particular about film because of a childhood experience.

When I went to the cinema with my family when I was a child, I saw many people gathered together to watch movies and felt the unique atmosphere of the cinema itself. I felt that the charm and specialness of movie theaters is that you can have such a special experience with people you don’t know sitting next to each other, crying, laughing, etc……. I originally preferred watching movies to making them (laughs).

Eventually, when he entered university and encountered films produced by students, he became strongly interested in making films.

I learned that there was a genre called “student films. Everyone there was making what they wanted to make, rather than how it would be seen by others, and some of the films were nearly unfinished (laughs). (laughs) But for me, it was also a discovery that I could make films with such freedom.

He joined the film club at Ritsumeikan University and began making films. During his 18 years at the university, at the age of 22, the opportunity to make a name for himself came. Kaneko was chosen out of approximately 200 applicants for a film project produced by Yuki Yamato.

It was an eight-minute film. I asked Sari Ito to play the role because it was something that exposed my past experiences, and I wanted someone who I could relate to and who could show the gap between expressionless faces and smiling faces. I remember being overwhelmed by her ability to grasp the intention of the work. I was also very particular about the movement of the extras in this film, and I tried to connect the scenes by following their movements with my eyes.

Since then, the film has won the Grand Prix in the feature film category at “MOOSIC LAB 2019” and won the Grand Prix in the feature film category at “MOOSIC LAB 2019. In 2008, he also created a music video for Naotaro Moriyama. He is currently working on his next film, which will be released nationwide in 2011.

His next film is a film starring people who have never been treated in commercial films before. For example, if a person who has withdrawn from society appears in a normal film, the film would depict the change of that person’s withdrawal, but in reality, there are people who remain withdrawn. I hope that through the film I can spend some time confronting these things.”

With his unique style, he will weave a story that everyone has overlooked.

ProfileYurina Kaneko / Born in Tokyo in 1995. Started making music videos and films while a student at Ritsumeikan University. Directed “Eating Bug” (’16), “projection” (’20 “21st Century Girl”), “Sleeping Bug” (’19), etc.

From the June 3, 2022 issue of FRIDAY