The Tokyo International Film Festival hands a prize named for Japan's most national of auteurs to Mohammad Rasoulof — an Iranian director who can no longer set foot in the country whose cinema he has spent his life defining.
The Kurosawa Akira Award is, by its own description, a prize about the future. Tokyo gives it to filmmakers who have "made waves" and are "expected to help guide the industry's future," and it carries the name of the director who, more than any other, taught the world to read Japan on screen. For its 39th edition, running 26 October to 4 November, the festival hands that honour to two names at once: the Japanese-Korean director Mipo O, and the Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof — a man who cannot set foot in the country whose cinema he has spent his life defining.
The prize named for a master, given to a fugitive
Rasoulof's filmography reads like a charge sheet. Censorship, filmmaking bans, prison sentences; a Golden Bear in 2020 for *There Is No Evil*, collected in his absence because a travel ban kept him home; a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2024 for *The Seed of the Sacred Fig*, after which an eight-year sentence drove him out of Iran and into a safe house in Germany. He has assembled a body of work by shooting clandestinely, guerrilla-style, against the active opposition of his own state. To call that a "career" is to reach for the wrong vocabulary. It is closer to a resistance.
Which is what makes Tokyo's choice sharper than a tribute. Kurosawa's name stands for cinema as national self-portrait — Japan showing itself, and being seen, through one towering sensibility. Rasoulof's cinema is the opposite case: an art with no safe territory, made in defiance of the nation it describes, and viable only because festivals exist to receive it. Strip away Cannes, Berlin, Tokyo, and a filmmaker like Rasoulof does not merely lose prizes; he loses the infrastructure that lets his films reach anyone at all. The circuit is not his showcase. It is his funding, his distribution, his protection and, increasingly, his address.
For a banned filmmaker, the festival circuit isn't a stage to be noticed on. It's the only country left that will have him.
The pairing with Mipo O quietly doubles the point. A Japanese director of Korean descent — her *The Light Shines Only There* took Best Director at Montreal in 2014 — she is another artist whose work sits across a national border rather than neatly inside one. Tokyo could have read "guide the industry's future" as a bet on technology or scale. It chose instead to read it as a question about who gets to make films, under what conditions, and where. The answer the festival offers is modest and enormous at once: the future of auteur cinema may depend less on any single national tradition than on the circuit's willingness to be a home for directors who have lost theirs. When Rasoulof collects the award in Tokyo this autumn, he will do it as a guest of the festival system — because there is nowhere else that will have him.