How did your love for filmmaking begin?
I began wanting to make movies when I was about 12. From the age of 13, I started making a short film each year. All were 8mm movies, low-budget, and very rudimentary in technique. It started from my love of looking at photos, which I still like to do. There was a photography shop near our house. When I looked at those portraits, a story in my mind developed naturally. Images make me travel to another world. The first time I went to a cinema hall, I was perhaps five or six years old. When I entered, half of the film was already gone. It was an Eastern European film with a very young boy as the protagonist. When the movie ended, I kept thinking about what might have happened in the first half. I imagined that I was the protagonist, and thought about what could have happened in the first half. Without even realizing it, I was making a movie in my mind.u00a0

Applause: A scene from Masato Harada’s Chronicle Of My Mother, which has won much world acclaim. File Picture