Drive My Car (2021)

Drive My Car is Japan’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the next Academy Awards.

The film is a masterful drama, travelling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace.

Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theatre festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900.

As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koji Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins, with the help of his driver, to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind.

Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is the Winner of the Best Screenplay Award and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

This film is predominantly in Japanese and will be shown with English subtitles.

The title also features a variety of other languages: Korean, English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Indonesian, German and Malaysian.

“An engrossing and exalting experience” The Guardian ★★★★★

“Hamaguchi’s filmmaking… reaches new heights of refinement and sensory richness” Variety
“a profoundly beautiful, haunting murakami adaptation” The Telegraph ★★★★★