Miwa Nishikawa

Miwa Nishikawa (西川美å'Œ, Nishikawa Miwa, born July 8, 1974 in Asaminami-ku, Hiroshima) is a Japanese director and screenwriter.

Life and career

Nishikawa began her film career as a college student working as a staff member on Hirokazu Koreeda's 1998 film After Life. Soon afterward she was an assistant director for Yoshimitsu Morita on his 1999 thriller The Black House (é»'い家, Kuroi ie). She once again worked for Koreeda as an assistant director on his 2001 movie Distance, and when Nishikawa went on to write and direct her first feature film, the September 2003 release, Wild Berries, Koreeda was the producer. The film won her the Best New Director award at the 2004 Yokohama Film Festival, the Best New Director prize at the 13th Japanese Professional Movie Awards and the Best Screenplay Award and one of the Sponichi Grand Prize New Talent Awards at the 58th Mainichi Film Concours for 2003.

After directing a segment in the omnibus work Fiimeiru, Nishikawa wrote and directed her second feature film Sway in 2006. The film brought Nishikawa both the Best Screenplay and Best Director awards at the 28th Yokohama Film Festival and the film won First Place Best Film at the festival. In 2009, she directed her third full length film Dear Doctor and also wrote the screenplay which she adapted from her own novel. Nishikawa won the Best Screenplay award at the 31st Yokohama Film Festival where Dear Doctor took the Best Film Award. She also took the Best Director award at the 2009 Hochi Film Awards.

Nishikawa's next film, Dreams for Sale, about a young couple engaged in a marriage fraud scheme, was released in Japan in September 2012 and was shown at various international film festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival and at the Japan Society of New York. Nishikawa traveled to San Francisco for the film's screening at the first Japan Film Festival in San Francisco in August 2013. At an interview there she lamented the state of the Japanese film industry saying that it was boring because "Nobody wants to embark on a venture."

Filmography

• Wild Berries (蛇イチゴ, Hebi ichigo) (2003)
• Fiimeiru (Segment: "Megami no kakato") (2005)
• Sway (Yureru) (2006)
• Ten Nights of Dreams (Segment: "The Ninth Dream") (2006)
• Dear Doctor (2009)
• Dreams for Sale (夢売るふたり, Yume uru futari) (2012)

References

External links

• Miwa Nishikawa at the Internet Movie Database
• Miwa Nishikawa at the Japanese Movie Database (Japanese)