From Łódź to Nagasaki: An Interview with Kei Ishikawa

keia_ishikawy_portret.jpg, default, Kei Ishikawa, photo: press materials

Unlike most Japanese film directors, Kei Ishikawa graduated from the Łódź Film School in Poland. His affiliation with the country continues to this day – his latest film ‘A Pale View of Hills’ features a score by Paweł Mykietyn and cinematography by Piotr Niemirski.

A Pale View of Hills recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section. This adaptation of the Nobel Prize-winning Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel is a Polish co-production, with key roles on the crew taken up by the highly respected Mykietyn and Niemirski. Culture.pl’s Łukasz Mańkowski talks to Kei Ishikawa all about his new film as well as his favourite connections between Poland and Japan, how one captures the ambience of Nagasaki, his formative experiences living in Łódź, and the influence of Polish film makers on the development of his visual sensitivity.

Łukasz Mańkowski: How did it happen that you studied film in Łódź?

Kei Ishikawa: I’ve probably heard this question hundreds of times, but I still don’t think I quite know the answer to it. When I look back on my youth, I remember watching a lot of films – classics by Wajda, Kieślowski and Polański. They had a big influence on me, that’s for sure, but at the time, I was more interested in Poland itself – a distant country under the communist regime that seemed to be very different from 1980s Japan during the bubble era. Back then, I remember wanting to go somewhere far away, and it just so happened that Poland started to fascinate me. I wanted to get to know the place because it seemed like it’d be an adventure.

When I found myself in Łódź, I immediately noticed that the city was extremely photogenic. I also felt welcomed by the Polish people – the thought then came to me that I could live in Poland. Although I was surrounded by people from afar, I still managed to feel a sense of closeness to them. That said, it was Łódź that fascinated me the most. Polański once said that more than Warsaw, it was Łódź that was the land that breathes through film. Many interesting people studied with me, including Magnus von Horn and Łukasz Żal, and it soon became a special place for me – with a great community, an extraordinary atmosphere and people who wanted to make films more than anything else.

ŁM: Łódź is a truly unique spot on Poland’s map. What sort of images of the city persist in your mind?

KI: This might be a rather unusual anecdote... When I moved to Łódź, I obviously had to face the Polish winter. It snowed a lot, so I needed solid winter boots. However, after a while I had to have them repaired. I found a cobbler on Smutna Street. It was a small workshop run by one person – a rather big and upstanding cobbler who told me to come back for my shoes in a few days. I came to him every week, but every time the boots still hadn’t been repaired. One day, instead of shoes, he gave me a glass of vodka. Even though we drank together, I still had to come back again the following week for the shoes. And even then, I didn’t get them either.

It’s said to be quite dangerous on Smutna Street. Even among students, people always say to avoid it, that it’s better not to venture into the area. Despite the warnings, I was there every week. I visited my cobbler for about two months. He didn’t fix my shoes, even though we were already bottle buddies. One day, I couldn’t find him in his workshop. I found out he’d been taken to hospital as a result of illness. He died there. But I got a final message from him via his neighbour – my cobbler had left me something: a pair of repaired, shiny shoes. I guess that’s my picture of Łódź.

Of course, I’ve had other experiences too. I’ve been beaten up more than once, and even encountered football hooligans. Łódź, like many other Polish cities, faces a plethora of problems – like unemployment and violence on the streets. But there are also people and their stories – and these are like films to me. It doesn’t always have to be about safety or fun. Life isn’t like that. Being in Łódź, I felt a bit like I was in Kieślowski's world. Although The Decalogue is set in Warsaw, I think you can feel the real ambience of that film series in Łódź.

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Art_Inkubator in Łódź, photo: Marcin Stępień/AG

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ŁM: The film making style that derives from the Łódź Film School is also about aesthetics and the philosophy of cinema making. Poles often joke that their films have bottle green colour schemes and lots of shots of dripping taps to reflect systemic hopelessness. When you were studying there, did you feel that you were encountering an already established film system and aesthetic?

KI: I think the Łódź Film School has changed a bit over the time. It’s constantly evolving. At the time when I was studying, I was sceptical because there was nearly no freedom. Everything felt like it was part of an authoritarian system. The word of knowledge that was circulating seemed to be absolute there. The lecturers were open about it: if we dreamed of creative freedom, we had better seek it outside the walls of the school. That being said, I was young and I did have my moments of rebellion, but the film school gave me the basics. They were rigid rules, but they proved to be helpful and essential. Polański said that the process of becoming a film maker is about forgetting what you learned at school. In my case, this very much applies. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but that’s the way it is.

When I was at university, I had these thoughts when we were drinking with my colleagues – we used to complain that the films made at the school didn’t make sense. We laughed at the fact that every production by Łódź students was about an unwanted pregnancy and abortion or about children who have bruises on their bodies. We started thinking that perhaps films shouldn’t just be about human misery. It was from these conversations that we picked up new directions: Magnus von Horn is making his stuff and Leszek Dawid is now the dean of the directing department. We used to dream of putting ourselves out there, and now these people are creating something with a completely different energy.

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Krzysztof Kieślowski, photo: Wojciech Druszcz / Reporter / East News

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ŁM: You mentioned Kieślowski – he seems to be a very frequent reference for Japanese film makers. Why is his legacy so apparent in Japan?

KI: One reason is that he was very handsome! He had gigantic appeal with female audiences, through the themes of his films too, which found resonance with women. They were very memorable. But beyond that, I think Kieślowski also had a unique sense of the drama of human destiny.

ŁM: In your latest film ‘A Pale View of Hills’, you decided to collaborate with Polish artists. Piotr Niemyjski is responsible for creating the film’s post-war image of Nagasaki. How did you go about creating a vision for this post-traumatic landscape?

KI: Firstly, we didn’t want to depict Nagasaki through a simple flashback. Instead, the space of the city became a narrative that lives in the main character Etsuko, a figure who leaves Nagasaki for England after the war. We are shown the Japanese city through multiple filters of subjectivity, and because of this, Etsuko embodies the figure of an unreliable narrator.

The Nagasaki from the original novel is a space we see through the lens of its inhabitants’ perceptions. Many people have accused Kazuo Ishiguro of historical inaccuracy because there are things that happen in his novel that theoretically shouldn’t have been happening at the time. Many critics of his work explain it with the fact that Ishiguro left his native Nagasaki for England, saying he doesn’t quite remember everything as it should be.

However, there is no error here. It’s simply the way Ishiguro was looking at the space of Nagasaki – through a fictional filter. In his prose, Nagasaki is an imagined city. Understanding this treatment was crucial to our own vision of the space. That’s why our cinematic Nagasaki is an equally unreliable reflection of reality – there’s a lot of fiction and dreamlike quality to it.

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Still from the film 'A Pale View of Hills', directed by Kei Ishikawa, produced in Japan, Poland, and the United Kingdom, 2025, photo: courtesy of the distributor.

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ŁM: Did you use any references from Japanese cinema to capture the spirit of the space?

KI: When Piotr read Ishiguro’s original, he immediately thought of the films of Yasujiro Ozu. I myself felt a stronger proximity to the films made by Mikio Naruse rather than Ozu, but it was essentially about capturing a certain atmosphere from the Golden Era of Japanese Cinema in the 1950s, both in terms of colour and technicality. For Japanese film makers, aspiring to Ozu carries a frightening burden. Ozu will always be Ozu; Ozu can only be imitated by Ozu – him alone. It’s quite dangerous to go down a path of trying to replicate his style. Especially if you don’t have your own identity.

When I was thinking about Nagasaki, I thought about a space that consists of different layers – fiction, subjectivity, memory – but some of the shots became inspired by Ozu’s framing style. There were also some scenes that reminded us of Kieślowski’s films – when we were shooting one of them, some light was reflecting onto Etsuko from the opposite building. When we finished the scene, Piotr said to me that it reminded him of Kieslowski’s aesthetics. Interestingly, now that I think of it, I feel that Kieślowski may have influenced how I wanted to depict the light from the atomic bomb.

ŁM: Paweł Mykietyn, who is known for his subtlety, is responsible for the film’s music. How did you try to convey the spirit of Nagasaki through sound?

KI: Let me start by saying that I got to know Paweł’s music through a screening of Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO. Its soundtrack made a huge impression on me. I wanted him to join the project because I was curious to see what he’d be able to extract from Ishiguro’s prose. I wanted to hear his interpretation of literary original’s spirit.

When we were looking for a composer, we thought about what we might need. There are two iconic artists for film music in Japan: Ryuichi Sakamoto and Toru Takemitsu. Sakamoto stands for the world of delicacy and water, while Takemitsu is a volcano of emotions. In the case of A Pale View of Hills, I felt the story needed the latter – I needed someone to bring out the emotions, as Takemitsu did.

Listening to Paweł Mykietyn's music, I hear the presence of the world he’s portraying. Of course, there’s subtlety and purity in it too, but above all, his music becomes a separate character in the story. This can also be a hindrance – that the music ends up dominating the image. But in this case, we’re jumping between post-war Nagasaki and 1980s England, so Mykietyn’s sounds simultaneously become the binder of these separate realities, helping to determine the rhythm of the story’s flow. When I was thinking about what I needed from his music, the thought came to me that I’d like it to have a distinct personality.

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Still from the film 'A Pale View of Hills', dir. Kei Ishikawa, produced in Japan, Poland, and the United Kingdom, 2025, photo: distributor's press materials.

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ŁM: In other interviews, you mention that an important aspect of ‘A Pale View of Hills’ is the opportunity to show the theme of war to younger generations. What kind of discussion around the film are you looking for?

KI: The film certainly grows out of my experience of living in Poland – that had a very important influence on me. The Second World War is a recurring theme in Polish films and will remain so for a long time to come. The reality of war was depicted many times by both Wajda and Polański. The thing is – they knew this reality. For the younger generations, it’s not something they can face easily. I myself cannot, and many people in Japan think the same. Akira Kurosawa was able to talk about post-war reality because he himself lived during that time. He survived the war. But our generation? We only know the stories.

It’s now 80 years since the end of the war, but slowly, history too is beginning to slip away from us, because there’s no one to tell it. The memory of it is also fading. Sometimes it only takes a few years for something to be suppressed. That’s why my story has the perspective of two women: their memories, their lies, their ideas around what happened. It doesn’t really matter that not everything is true – I want to hear their story. I think this way of embracing history resonates with my generation.

‘Fact-based’ stories can be studied endlessly, but sometimes it’s not about the official message that comes with history, but the smaller details that make up the private dimension of the story. These will be the unspoken words, the hidden gestures, the secrets passed on, the narratives that stem from objects. These are traces of memories that won’t find their way into textbooks, but, at the same time, this is what really matters in the generational transmission of history.

Interview originally conducted in Japanese and later translated by Łukasz Mańkowski, June 2025

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