DRIVE MY CAR

Two years after the sudden death of his wife, actor and theatre director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) accepts an offer: to stage Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at a festival in Hiroshima, with a multilingual cast. The festival assigns him a driver, the taciturn Misaki (Toko Miura), who from then on drives his red Saab while he rehearses in the back seat the lines his late wife recorded on cassette. Among the cast is also a young television star with whom Kafuku shares an unspoken history. “Drive My Car” by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan 2021, brings these people together inside a car, where the unsaid slowly finds words.

The source is a short story by Haruki Murakami, which Hamaguchi stretches to three hours without a single minute running empty: rehearsals, drives, conversations, until the text on stage and the life before it align. At Cannes 2021 the film won the award for Best Screenplay; it later won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film and was additionally nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. “Drive My Car” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2021.

Shown at the 2021 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2021 · Film Archive