{"id":622786,"date":"2026-09-21T11:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T11:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/622786\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T11:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T11:06:09","slug":"maha-harada-on-directorial-debut-in-my-fathers-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/622786\/","title":{"rendered":"Maha Harada on Directorial Debut ‘In My Father’s Room’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMaha Harada<\/a> spent two decades building scenes on the page before she ever stood behind a camera.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow 64, the best-selling Japanese author is making her feature directorial debut with \u201cIn My Father\u2019s Room,\u201d a film adapted from her own short story \u201cAn Unnecessary Man,\u201d and it arrives in competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival<\/a> before moving on to the Busan International Film Festival<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\n\tAhead of both stops, Bitters End has already sold the film<\/a> to France, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, with more territories under discussion.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe transition from novels to film feels less like a leap than a continuation, Harada says. Her years working as a museum curator shaped how she writes long before she considered directing. \u201cWhen I write fiction, I tend to depict scenes and the characters\u2019 inner lives as if looking through a camera,\u201d she says, adding that adapting \u201cAn Unnecessary Man\u201d felt natural because the story is set in a town she once lived in and can still picture in exact detail. She describes the short story as an ordinary, universal story of a father and daughter, deliberately free of mysteries, schemes or sensual drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat story follows Satomi, an art museum worker who learns almost nothing about her father, Yuichi, until after he has died alone. Harada says the character grew directly out of her own family. Her father sold art books, loved film and gambling, and \u201cnever stopped causing trouble,\u201d she says, but he also introduced her to Picasso at age 10 and took her to see \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d and \u201cThe Castle of Sand\u201d at 12. It was only once he was gone, she says, that she understood how much he had taught her.<\/p>\n

\n\tCentral to the film is the idea that Yuichi\u2019s value cannot be measured by his usefulness to society, a theme Harada says she wanted to explore directly. \u201cWhether or not you\u2019re happy is something you decide for yourself,\u201d she says, arguing that a life spent pursuing things whose worth is apparent only to oneself can still be a happy one, however little it resembles society\u2019s idea of success. She adds that Yuichi\u2019s willingness to die alone, having chased only what mattered to him, could be seen as extreme, but says no one can call his life anything other than happy.<\/p>\n

\n\tVisually, Harada built the film around two anchors: the Japanese tea ceremony, or chanoyu, and a painting by Mark Rothko. She wanted to bring the ceremony\u2019s quiet, everyday symbolism to the screen, and to pair it with Rothko\u2019s work as a Western counterpart to that same sense of beauty. She notes that Japanese museums collectively hold 10 works by Rothko, acquired by curators who recognized the artist\u2019s spiritual quality decades before his prices climbed, a fact that still makes her proud.<\/p>\n

\n\tMoving from prose to a film set meant giving up some control, Harada says. Before filming began, she recalls, her assistant director read the script and asked her, \u201cIsn\u2019t there too much stage direction?\u201d The comment made her realize that a novel is, in her words, almost entirely stage direction, with the writer controlling every detail the reader sees. On a film set, other collaborators have to be given room to interpret. She trimmed the script accordingly, and after being told there was \u201cstill too much explanation,\u201d cut it further on set, ultimately paring the dialogue down to very little.<\/p>\n

\n\tWorking with Yu Aoi, who plays Satomi, and Issey Ogata, who plays her father, Yuichi, reinforced that shift. She singles out a scene where Satomi comes home after being laid off and simply leaves the tap running, calling it a moment where Aoi conveyed despair through almost nothing at all, and says she sometimes forgot to call \u201ccut\u201d while watching her work. Ogata, she says, gave Yuichi a lived-in warmth, playing a father with no money or status who never lets go of the things he cares about most. She calls his performance of the tea ceremony one of the film\u2019s biggest highlights.<\/p>\n

\n\tCinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa, whose earlier credits include \u201cEvil Does Not Exist,\u201d shaped the film\u2019s look alongside Harada during visits to tea ceremonies and museum viewings of Rothko\u2019s work. She points to Yasujiro Ozu and Victor Erice\u2019s \u201cThe Spirit of the Beehive\u201d as touchstones for the film\u2019s tone, and to Kei Kumai\u2019s \u201cDeath of a Tea Master\u201d as a specific visual reference for the ceremony scenes.<\/p>\n

\n\tHarada says reaching audiences outside Japan has been the hardest part of her writing career, even as her novels have found readers in South Korea, China and Taiwan. Entering the film world at 64 was partly about proving that age should not limit what someone takes on, she says, crediting the cast and crew who stayed with the project throughout.<\/p>\n

\n\tHaving adapted and directed her own writing once, Harada says she is open to doing so again, though the idea of writing something built specifically for the screen, rather than adapting an existing novel, had not seriously occurred to her before now. She calls the process of directing \u201cIn My Father\u2019s Room\u201d a dreamlike experience unlike anything else in her career. \u201cIf this is a dream, I hope I never wake up,\u201d she says. Asked what comes next, she says she plans to keep writing novels alongside directing more films, rather than choosing one path over the other, adding that doing both will make things twice as hard, and, she believes, twice as wonderful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maha Harada spent two decades building scenes on the page before she ever stood behind a camera. Now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[22260,146,85,281586,46,281587,397,25204],"class_list":["post-622786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-busan-international-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-in-my-fathers-room","tag-israel","tag-maha-harada","tag-movies","tag-san-sebastian-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}