Japanese director interviews these days usually follow a set format: Meet at the distributor’s office and, with a PR rep or two present, rattle off as many questions as you can in your allotted 30 minutes (sometimes 15). Bow and leave.
My Q&A session with Marina Tsukada, director of the two-part anthology film “Mitsuki, Sekai,” was different. First, we met at a small theater in Tokyo’s Otsuka neighborhood, where the film will open on Sept. 21 and where Tsukada herself had once worked. Second, next to the table where we talked was a baby carriage in which her 8-month-old son was sleeping — temporarily. Midway through the interview, he decided to join us and his mother barely missed a beat as she picked him up and calmed him.
Allowing real life to shape her work was also Tsukada’s method in scripting and directing “Mitsuki, Sekai”; she shot the anthology’s two parts separately and later combined them into a feature. Set in her native Nagano Prefecture, the film might be described as a sidebar to an ongoing project called “Toki” (Time) that traces the lives of local children for a decade until they reach adulthood. “Mitsuki,” completed in 2020, won the Best Asian Short prize at the Spain Moving Images Festival, while the 2022 “Sekai” was selected for the Rotterdam International Film Festival.