O Mipo and Mohammad Rasoulof
Two Film Lives Meet Under the Kurosawa Akira Award

The two filmmakers chosen for the same award could hardly have arrived there by more different routes.

Japanese director O Mipo entered film production as a script supervisor and built a body of work around families, children and people living near society's margins. Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has made films under censorship, filmmaking bans, imprisonment and travel restrictions, eventually leaving Iran in 2024 after another prison sentence.

On September 29, the Tokyo International Film Festival announced that O and Rasoulof will receive the 2026 Kurosawa Akira Award. The selection committee consisted of directors Yamada Yoji and Lee Sang-il, cinematographer Ashizawa Akiko and TIFF Programming Director Ichiyama Shozo.

At first glance, they have little in common

O's films do not usually foreground geopolitics or state power. Their scale is intimate: a family, a school, a neighborhood, the pressures that become visible inside ordinary relationships.

Rasoulof's work directly engages systems of authority, censorship, capital punishment and political repression.

Yet TIFF's selection language reveals the connection.

The committee praised O for looking at people on society's margins without reducing them to a simple good-versus-evil judgment. It praised Rasoulof for portraying even people who participate in repression as citizens and human beings rather than flat embodiments of evil.

The scale differs enormously. The method does not: both resist simplifying human responsibility.

O Mipo began by keeping track of continuity

O graduated from the film program at Osaka University of Arts and entered the industry as a script supervisor after working around Obayashi Nobuhiko's production company.

A script supervisor is one of cinema's quiet continuity systems—tracking takes, performance, props, costume, movement, dialogue and visual continuity so that a film assembled out of fragments can become one coherent work.

Her first feature screenplay, The Sakais' Happiness, won the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award. She directed the film herself in 2006.

The 2026 award therefore comes exactly two decades after her feature debut.

A 2010 award helped keep the career moving

O won the Kaneto Shindo Award Gold Prize for Here Comes the Bride, My Mom! in 2010.

In her Kurosawa Award statement, she specifically returned to that recognition, saying it had given her important support to continue making films.

Film careers often look linear when reduced to a filmography. They rarely are. Financing, development, distribution, family life and the simple fact that one successful film does not guarantee another all shape whether a director can continue.

O described her progress as slow. That is part of the significance of a career award arriving after 20 years rather than after a rapid succession of films.

The Light Shines Only There carried her work abroad

O's 2014 film The Light Shines Only There, adapted from a novel by Yasushi Sato and set in Hakodate, became the major international turning point in her career.

She won Best Director in the World Competition at the Montreal World Film Festival. TIFF says the film accumulated about 60 awards in Japan and overseas and was selected as Japan's submission for the 87th Academy Awards international-film category.

The film's importance is not simply its awards count. It looks closely at poverty, family damage and compromised lives without converting the characters into objects of pity.

That refusal to use social marginality as shorthand is exactly what TIFF's 2026 selection committee highlighted.

Being Good turned toward children without turning them into symbols

O's 2015 Being Good deals with child abuse, schools, parents and isolation and won Best Asian Film at the Moscow International Film Festival.

Children in films about social problems can easily become devices: victim, innocent, problem child, symbol of hope.

O's direction works against that simplification. Children remain unpredictable people who move, resist, laugh, misbehave and form relationships beyond the categories adults assign to them.

TIFF specifically cited Being Good, Living in Two Worlds and How Dare You? in praising that approach.

A nine-year feature gap was not nine years without a life

After Being Good, nine years passed before O directed another feature.

TIFF's official biography notes that she had two children during that period. She returned to features with Living in Two Worlds in 2024.

Based on the life writing of Dai Igarashi, the film follows a hearing son raised by deaf parents and was selected for competition at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

The word “return” can make the interruption sound like a personal detour. It is also an industrial question. Whether directors can combine filmmaking with pregnancy, childcare and family life depends partly on how production systems are structured.

How Dare You? became the 20-year marker

O's latest feature, How Dare You?, was released in 2025 and selected for competition at the Zlín Film Festival, with further international festival screenings following.

Its Japanese title, Futsu no Kodomo—roughly “ordinary children”—fits a recurring idea in O's cinema. The child is not idealized into innocence or reduced to a social category. The person remains contradictory.

The Kurosawa Award committee framed that continuing attention to children and people at the edge of social attention as part of why O's future work matters.

This year's award winner also shaped this year's festival poster

O already had an unusually visible role in the 39th TIFF before the award announcement.

She supervised the official poster unveiled on September 11.

The 2026 festival theme is “CONNECT — Beyond the World Linked by Cinema.” TIFF describes cinema as a medium capable of making another person's pain or joy emotionally legible across divisions of politics, economics, culture, religion and gender.

Weeks later, the same festival selected O and Rasoulof for the Kurosawa Award. The pairing feels particularly aligned with that theme: each director, by radically different means, asks audiences to inhabit the moral world of people unlike themselves.

For Rasoulof, making a film repeatedly became a confrontation with authority

Mohammad Rasoulof was born in Shiraz in southern Iran. After studying sociology, he moved into documentary work and made his first feature in 2000.

From there, his filmography cannot be cleanly separated from state restrictions placed on him.

According to TIFF and the Cannes Film Festival, Rasoulof was arrested and imprisoned in 2010 while making a film. He later faced filmmaking restrictions and travel bans and continued working through clandestine production methods.

It would be reductive, however, to describe the movies only as “anti-government films.” Their recurring question is more difficult: what responsibility does an ordinary person carry when the institution around that person demands an unjust act?

There Is No Evil is not a film about cartoon villains

There Is No Evil won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020 and was screened at the 33rd TIFF.

Set against Iran's death-penalty system, its linked stories follow people who obey orders, refuse them, evade them or discover that one institutional choice can reshape an entire private life.

The title is not a claim that evil does not exist. The film asks what happens when institutional violence is administered not by monsters, but by ordinary people under pressure.

That perspective closely matches TIFF's 2026 explanation for honoring Rasoulof.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig moved the state into the family home

Rasoulof's 2024 The Seed of the Sacred Fig pushed his international profile still further.

The story centers on an examining magistrate in Tehran, his wife and two daughters. As protests spread outside, a gun disappears inside the home and the father's suspicion turns inward against his own family.

The political system is not shown only through institutions. It is reproduced through fear, authority and surveillance inside domestic life.

The film premiered in competition at Cannes in 2024 and received the festival's Special Prize.

In 2024, Rasoulof left Iran

Cannes' official account states that Rasoulof left Iran secretly in 2024 while facing a new prison sentence and was able to attend the festival with The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

TIFF's official profile describes the sentence as eight years and says he was compelled to leave Iran while completing the film. Cannes also documented that he faced a sentence carrying at least five years of imprisonment.

Those are attributable facts from the festival records. They should not be converted into unsupported speculation about the present status or motives of every Iranian legal action involving him.

An Iranian story became Germany's Oscar submission

In 2025, The Seed of the Sacred Fig represented Germany and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

An Iranian-born director, telling a story located in Iran, represented by Germany: the path itself illustrates how contemporary cinema crosses the older boundaries of nationality, exile, production finance and cultural identity.

Rasoulof's films are deeply rooted in Iranian society, but their ability to exist has also depended on international production, distribution and festival networks.

What it means to put Kurosawa's name on an award

Akira Kurosawa died in 1998 at age 88.

Films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Yojimbo and Ran profoundly changed the international reception of Japanese cinema and influenced generations of filmmakers outside Japan.

An award named after him would be narrow if it merely rewarded directors who make films resembling Kurosawa's.

TIFF instead frames the award around contribution and future possibility—cinema that carries the medium forward. Its revival in 2022 after a 14-year hiatus reinserted that idea into the festival's institutional identity.

Rasoulof reads Kurosawa through moral choice

In his acceptance statement, Rasoulof described Kurosawa's films as profound explorations of the human condition and of the moral choices people face in moments of crisis.

That interpretation could describe Rasoulof's own work.

There Is No Evil asks what a person does when the state issues an order. The Seed of the Sacred Fig asks what a man does with authority when fear enters his home.

Kurosawa's Ikiru, in a very different political setting, turns on a civil servant's late decision about what action inside a bureaucracy can mean.

The films do not share a political program. They share an interest in the individual inside a system.

O's statement is about having been able to continue

O's award statement is strikingly different in tone.

She talks about reaching the 20th anniversary of her first film, the support the Kaneto Shindo Award gave her, and gratitude toward crews, actors, audiences, the selection committee and her family.

Filmographies make careers look like uninterrupted sequences of titles. Actual careers contain years when a film does not get made, other work, family responsibilities and uncertainty about whether the next project will happen.

O calling her progress slow makes the award feel less like a coronation than recognition of continuity itself.

The 2026 TIFF theme makes the pairing more legible

The 39th Tokyo International Film Festival runs from October 26 through November 4 in Hibiya, Yurakucho, Marunouchi, Ginza and surrounding areas.

Its theme is “CONNECT.”

TIFF's stated idea is that cinema can cross divisions by turning distant information into felt human experience.

O and Rasoulof approach that possibility from opposite scales.

O starts close enough to notice the person overlooked inside a family or neighborhood. Rasoulof starts with a system of state power and keeps moving inward until it becomes the decision of a husband, father, soldier or official.

TIFF will also show films Kurosawa loved

To accompany the award, TIFF announced a program titled “Kurosawa Akira's Favorite Films.”

The four titles are Charlie Chaplin's The Circus (1928), Kurosawa's own Sanshiro Sugata 4K restoration (1943), Ikiru 4K restoration (1952), and Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? (1987).

The choice is instructive because it does not turn Kurosawa into a closed monument. It places his own work beside filmmakers he admired, showing artistic influence as a network rather than a one-way legacy.

Reducing one to “courage” and the other to “gentleness” misses the work

It would be easy to summarize Rasoulof as the courageous filmmaker and O as the compassionate filmmaker.

Both labels are too comfortable.

Rasoulof's films are not significant merely because making them was risky. They turn political systems into complex moral drama populated by ordinary people.

O's films are not significant merely because they are empathetic. She gets close to characters without granting them easy innocence or easy condemnation.

The selection committee's language circles back to the same point for both directors: neither simplifies people.

An award that keeps Kurosawa's name out of the past tense

It is easy to place Akira Kurosawa safely inside film history under the label “master.”

If a contemporary festival uses his name for an award, history alone is not enough.

The award has to answer a harder question: what part of the legacy moves forward?

O Mipo keeps looking closely at people whose lives are easy to flatten into social categories. Mohammad Rasoulof keeps asking what happens when institutions force moral decisions onto ordinary people.

Their films do not look like Kurosawa's films.

That may be exactly why the pairing works.

Preserving Kurosawa's legacy does not require producing more Kurosawa-like cinema. It means carrying forward the belief that film can look at human beings in full complexity—and then passing that power to filmmakers working in different countries, different circumstances and a different century.