The beloved cult actor, director and comedian will attend the festival in person in late April to receive the honor.
In many ways Kitano would appear an ideal embodiment of the festival’s programming ethos. Unlike most European festivals, which tend to emphasize the rarified aesthetics of Asian art house cinema, Udine is foremost devoted to providing a platform for filmmaking from the Far East that has achieved commercial traction in its home markets — thus offering festival-goers a surprisingly rare window onto the contemporary cinema that the world’s most populous region is actually watching en masse.
Kitano is a figure whose career has crossed nearly every facet of Japanese filmed entertainment, achieving both niche cult acclaim and broad popular success. Once described by influential Japanese critic Nagaharu Yodogawa as “the true successor” to Akira Kurosawa, Kitano famously began his career in the 1970s with a bawdy take on Japan’s Manzai standup comedy tradition, rising to become one of the country’s most recognizable comedians.
After several eye-catching supporting performances, one of his first serious roles on film came in Nagisa Oshima’s , in which he played a brutal WWII POW camp sergeant opposite Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie. Following other acting jobs he launched his career as a director with the neo-noirTakeshi’s Castle
, one of the longest-running and most successful Japanese variety shows of all time. His directorial career took
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