Behind Japan's seminal film exploring queer childhoods

Louis Chilton speaks to award-winning filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda about 'Monster', which tells the story of two young schoolboys who find themselves drawn to one another

- Louis Chilton

“The greatest knowledge we can pass on is empathy,” said John Cameron Mitchell, the filmmaker behind the totemic queer musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He was speaking in his capacity as the chair of the Cannes Film Festival’s Queer Palm jury last year, while awarding the prize to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster. The first Japanese film to win the award, it is a moving and formally ambitious story of two young schoolboys who find, in each other, young and innocent love. “We as queer people – who cannot and do not wish to conform – honour this film because its maker understands that the outsider is a shaman,” Cameron Mitchell continued. “The outsider possesses secret knowledge that is vital to the evolution and survival of our society.”

Kore-eda, 61, has spent much of his career exploring the lives of outsiders, whether it’s the grief-stricken Yumiko in his 1995 breakthrough film Maborosi, the down-on-his-luck private dick Ryota in 2016’s After the Storm, or the found family of petty thieves in 2018’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters. But the latest film from the director – one of the best and most profoundly humanistic filmmakers working today – sees him venture into new and delicate territory.

“When they gave it [the Queer Palm], I heard the jury reading out the comments, and they said that this was a film that shone a light on people who weren’t able to adapt to society,” Kore-eda says, speaking to me over Zoom via a translator. “It made me think, actually, yeah, that is pretty much what I was trying to do."