Biography
Born in Kobe on July 19, 1955, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not related to director Akira Kurosawa. After studying at Rikkyo University in Tokyo under the guide of prominent film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, where he began making 8mm films, Kurosawa began directing commercially in the 1980s, working on pink films and low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza films.
In the early 1990s, he won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute and was able to study filmmaking in the United States, although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.
Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his 1997 serial killer film Cure. Also that year, Kurosawa experimented by filming two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent's Path and Eyes of the Spider, both of which shared the same premise (a father taking revenge for his child's murder) and lead actor (Show Aikawa) but spun entirely different stories.
Kurosawa followed up Cure with a semi-sequel in 1999 with Charisma, which established his penchant for apocalyptic imagery and themes of identity and isolation. In 2001 Kurosawa directed Kairo, a film about ghosts invading the world of the living by way of the internet. Kurosawa has released Bright Future in 2003, starring Tadanobu Asano, Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, the first film of his shot with a 24p High-definition video camera. Kurosawa followed this with another digital feature, Doppelganger, later the same year.
In 2005, Kurosawa returned with Loft, his first love story since Seance. Another horror film, Retribution, followed in the next year. With his 2008 film, Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa was considered to step "out of his usual horror genre and into family drama."
He has written novelizations of some of his films, as well as a history of horror cinema with Makoto Shinozaki.
Kurosawa is set to direct The Day of the Real, Perfect Plesiosaur, which stars Takeru Sato and Haruka Ayase. In September 2012, it was announced that he will direct 1905, a film starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Shota Matsuda and Atsuko Maeda.
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