Maborosi · reception & legacy

1995 · Hirokazu Kore-eda

How Maborosi has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A quiet festival-circuit debut in 1995 (it picked up the Golden Osella for cinematography at Venice), Maborosi spent years as a connoisseur's secret — then Shoplifters' Palme d'Or sent everyone back through Kore-eda's filmography, and it got recrowned as one of the great first features.

What's debated

The eternal split: is its extreme stillness hypnotic or inert — and did Kore-eda ever again make anything this austere, or did he 'go soft' afterwards?

Its footprint

Its distant, held-forever compositions — above all the tiny funeral procession dwarfed by sea and sky — are fixtures of 'most beautiful shots ever' threads, making it a shorthand for grief filmed from far away.

Where it stands

A canon climber and Letterboxd slow-cinema darling — the 'actually, start with Maborosi' pick for people who only know late Kore-eda.

★ Did you know? Hou Hsiao-hsien — Kore-eda's hero, whom he'd just made a documentary about — told him Maborosi looked like it was shot from storyboards drawn before he'd ever met his actors; Kore-eda has said the sting of that critique made him ditch rigid storyboarding and reshaped everything he made afterwards.

Named by the director

Influences Hirokazu Kore-eda has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Hou Hsiao-hsien — Kore-eda has repeatedly named Hou as the formative influence on Maborosi's long-take, distanced style, having made a documentary on him just before shooting it.