Professor Yamakawa Naoto

• Professor, Tokyo Polytechnic University
• Film director

Yamakawa Naoto is a film director and professor at the Department of Imaging Art, Tokyo Polytechnic University. He began to create his own films after becoming a member of the Cinema Research Society while studying at Waseda University. His first film, Behind (60 min), was selected for the Pia Film Festival in 1978. His following 16mm films—Another Side (80 min, 1980) and the Murakami Haruki adapted works Attack on the Bakery (16 min, 1982) and A Girl, She is 100% (12 min, 1983)—were shown at international film festivals, including Edinburg, London and New York. With The New Morning of Billy the Kid (109 min, 1986), Yamakawa debuted into commercial cinema, and, after directing films such as Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s story So What (98 min, 1988), he won a scholarship to attend the Robert Redford founded Sundance Institute in 1993. His The smell of time—Remember me (77 min) set an audience record at the Ciné la sept, in Tokyo’s Ginza district, when it premiered in 2001.