Yusuke Kafuku Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Every year at the Cannes Film Festival there is a critics’ favorite. Last year, it was Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, a loose adaptation of three stories from Haruki Murakami’s 2014 compendium Men Without Women, that stars Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yūsuke Kafuku, an actor and theater director dealing with a tragic loss. Two years after the death of his playwright wife, Kafuku is invited by a theater festival to stage a multi-language production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, where he is assigned the taciturn chauffeur Misaki and meets the dangerous young actor Takatsuki. Though it only left Cannes with an award for Best Screenplay, Drive My Car went on to be the arthouse bulldozer of 2021, leading to a surprise three nominations—for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay—outside the expected Foreign Language Film nod. This interview took place shortly after Hamaguchi’s stint as juror at this year’s Berlinale…

EXCLUSIVE: Sonia Yuan, who stars in Japan’s first Best Picture Oscar nominee Drive My Car, has signed with Artist International Group for management.

record-breaking Oscar nominee Kenneth Branagh, “Belfast” is a semi-autographical film about a young boy named Buddy who lives in Belfast, Ireland in the late 1960s. His childhood is uprooted when civil war hits, forcing his tight-knit, working-class family to choose whether they should leave their longtime home.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car made history this morning, becoming the first Japanese film ever to score an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. What’s more, Hamaguchi is now only the third Japanese filmmaker to be nominated in the Best Director category. With nods in further key categories Best International Feature and Best Adapted Screenplay, Drive My Car has four nominations total, tying Akira Kurosawa’s Ran as the most-nominated film ever from Japan (though the latter was a French co-production).

The trailer for Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Cannes award winning movie, Drive My Car, is officially here!

EXCLUSIVE: The Match Factory has boarded international rights to Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s (Asako I & II) anticipated Haruki Murakami short story adaptation Drive My Car.