Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a Japanese filmmaker, critic, author, actor, and a former professor at Tokyo University of the Arts (2005–23). Noted for his psychological films that often focus on ambiguous narratives and on their characters' inner turmoils and quests for meaning and connections, he is best known for his contributions to psychological horror and Japanese horror, notably his acclaimed 1997 film Cure and his 2001 film Pulse, although he has also worked in a variety of other genres. While most of his work has been in Japanese, two of his films, Daguerrotype (2016) and Serpent's Path (2024; a remake of his own 1998 film of the same name), were in French. Kurosawa received the Medal with Purple Ribbon for his contributions to Japanese cinema, in 2021. The New York Times stated that Kurosawa "is to psychological fright what David Cronenberg is to body horror."
Photo: John Sears, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.