A film is like a journey. Its beginning is a departure whose end you can’t yet see.
Making one, I think, is far closer to going somewhere than to putting something together. You set out with a single idea and no map. Development takes years — that is the part where you draw the map. Then a shoot pulls a hundred, two hundred people into one place for a few months — a brief festival of focus, cleverness, and release — and then they scatter. Gathering after gathering, scattering after scattering. That is how a film gets finished. The child you’ve made is carried into a cinema to let out its first cry, then sent off around the festival circuit. And at some point it leaves for good: it no longer belongs to the people who made it, but to whoever is watching now.
I’ve walked that road a long time — twenty years or so in this industry. It began with a failure: I set out to be an independent documentary director, and didn’t make it. For a long time after, I was the one who made other people’s journeys possible — from independent films to celebrated directors to big productions, I gave them my hands and my feet, or tried to. I ran the floor, literally, my body and mind worn thin. “Filmmaking” is really dozens of departments doing work as different as A is from Z, all of it converging until the language of a film ripens. The producer’s department in particular sprawls in every direction (something I’ll write about another time): keeping the set moving is the whole mission, and logistics are your life. And yet, for all that devotion, a set never runs smoothly — and on the truly expert ones, beyond what my ability could handle, there were times I got in the way. Even so, inside, I was soaked to the skin in the thrill of watching a film come into being. I never stopped wishing I could one day shoot the scripts I’d written myself — but I didn’t have the skill, or the nerve, or the people to make it mine, so I filed it under “someone else’s job” and got a little bitter about it. A difficult person, I know.
Then I turned forty, and all the scales by which you measure a life begin to shift. More of the people I know set out from this world for good. Small things I’d waved off, looked away from, turn out to have quietly changed what I value — I used to give up less easily, didn’t I. My stamina is measurably lower now; my body has stopped arguing with gravity. The word menopause is suddenly close enough to touch. How much longer do I get to live a life of my own? — the plainest question wells up in me like water from a spring. And before I’ve even made peace with growing old, the limits of my own mind might arrive, and I’d lose track of who I am.
But it isn’t all bad. I know that everything I’ve lived through has become flesh and blood — and so, now and then, I feel as if I have an ally inside me. I used to avoid mirrors, and yet, to see for myself what’s changing, I look. And I catch myself saying: you’ve come a long way, you’ve worked hard. Out of that small embrace, a more serious voice comes down. Hey. Are you really okay with this? Take a little better care of yourself. Go and face the stories you actually wanted to tell. The setups you planted years ago are finally starting to pay off.
And so, one way or another, I took the step I’d been circling for years. I’m going to make the films and series I truly want to make — in good conditions, alongside people I actually want to make them with. What I want to write, I’ll write; what I want to direct, I’ll direct; what I want to produce, I’ll produce. I’m not changing careers, and it’s the same industry, so from the outside maybe nothing has changed at all. But inside me, I think, something has decisively broken ground — a point of departure that matters. Caring for my heart and my body, I’ll make the stories in the fog — the ones society, and we ourselves, tend to look away from. And stories with middle-aged women at their center, the people so easily rendered invisible. At twenty-five I never would have guessed it. But here I am, deep in my own middle age, making “films about middle-aged women” my life’s work.
The work ahead runs on two tracks, and that’s how I mean to keep the vow: original films I write and direct myself, and larger series, features, and international projects I develop from the ground up with other creators. I want to help — even a little — make it ordinary for a middle-aged woman to stand at the center of a story: not only in scrappy independent work, but in commercial films and big productions too. This is the record of that rough crossing — development, the craft of making, the world of festivals, and the people the industry has overlooked. The whole strange business of carrying a film from nowhere to somewhere: I hope to write all of it down. Arrival, and departure, again and again.
— Written in Japanese; this English version is remade from the original (with a little help from AI). The Japanese original lives on note →. My voice is my own. The friction of translation, too, is part of the work.