In Japan, an internship with filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda: "It's because it requires effort that cinema is so enjoyable"

“Making a film is hard, it requires time and hard work” : To schoolchildren born in the digital age in a world where it is now enough to ask an artificial intelligence (AI) to generate images, Hirokazu Kore-eda intends to bring through practice the most beautiful denial of passivity in front of the screen: "Creating is sweating, but that is what is joyful."

And children quickly understand this when the director asks them to imagine a story, to think of characters, to embody them. And even more so when, camera in hand, they have to shoot: choose the values of shots, the angles of view, adjust the lighting, the distance. Or when they have to hold a microphone on the end of a boom for long minutes without it entering the frame. "Distance, lighting, camera orientation, you can use many methods to express what you want, you have to search, try," advises the famous cinematographer Senzo Ueno, whose father also had the same profession.

Organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government with the Tokyo Arts Council, this free "seven days of summer cinema" course is part of a larger program to train future creators. Flyers were distributed in June to most elementary schools in Tokyo, and children aged 9-12 (fourth, fifth, and sixth graders) were randomly selected from among the more than 100 applications received.

“I’ve loved cinema since I was a child because my mother loved it and we watched a lot of films. And I remember that at school we imagined an adventure for the theater in the same circumstances as the trainees today. That’s what made me want to create. It’s important to introduce children to the filmmaking process, to enrich their cinematographic knowledge, to make them realize for themselves how difficult it is,” explains Kore-eda.

"The children were very surprised, for example, by the profession of sound effects when we took them to visit the Toho film studios. I think that seeing the work of professionals will change their way of watching a film. For us too, it's a great lesson to talk to children about our profession in terms they understand," adds the actor who very often directs teenagers . "I didn't think that some of the sounds were recorded this way, nor that it made such a difference whether or not these sounds were present in the images," confirms one of the young participants. "It's difficult, we had to start the shots several times, because of the microphone, or the camera," confesses another after an hour of filming.

" Yes, it is indeed difficult to make a film. There are some who may think that it would be simpler with AI. But I tell them that it is precisely because it requires effort, teamwork, where we confront opinions, where we do not always agree, where we may argue, but where in the end we create something together, that cinema is enjoyable. It is what does not require effort that is not interesting, that is what I want to transmit to them," Kore-eda tells us.

The short films made by the children during this workshop will be screened at the Tokyo Museum of Photography in September. "I think they'll have a completely different perspective on their images when they see them on the big screen, something they're not used to," the director emphasizes. But beyond that, the director of A Family Affair , winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival , hopes to inspire vocations: "I have the feeling that the sector is in danger, and my many activities are linked to this concern. The fact that I'm participating in this program to interest young people in cinema is not unrelated to my concern to improve the working environment on my shoots or the methods to be applied to clean up the sector. Japan is behind in film education, despite the fact that images overwhelm us. It is essential that we, the creators, educate young people."

Kore-eda has long been concerned about the future of Japanese cinema, where the workforce is aging without being replaced, due to the precariousness of the professions involved and unstable and unenviable salaries. An expert on the world of French cinema, he has been advocating for years for the establishment in Japan of a support system similar to that for intermittent entertainment workers in France. He also campaigns for the creation of a "Japanese CNC (National Center for Cinema), inspired by the French model, in order to partially support and finance films by collecting a percentage of the price of a cinema ticket.