Since 2013, the lens manufacturer Angénieux has presented an honorary award in Cannes to a cinematographer, celebrating a lifetime of achievement. This year, the Pierre-Angénieux Tribute Award (named after the company's founder and pioneer of the modern zoom lens) is being given for the first time to a Japanese cinematographer, Akiko Ashizawa. Portrait. 

In the still gender-poor world of Japanese cinema, women are rare. And of all film professions, that of cinematographer is known for being among those where inequality is most glaring. But, fortunately, there are always exceptional figures to pave the way and show the way. Akiko Ashizawa is one of them. A Japanese director of photography, she has been working in this field for over thirty years – after a long career as a camera assistant, notably on [film title missing]. Le Tattoo by Banmei Takahashi, an action film that was one of the major critical and commercial successes of the early 1980s in Japan. Like Takahashi, Akiko Ashizawa honed her skills in the pink film, This type of Japanese exploitation film blends eroticism and thriller. A lifelong lover of images, she began by shooting amateur 8mm films before realizing she was more of an image creator than a director – in front of The Conformist Of Bertolucci's films, she initially admired the work of the legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. In 1994, she landed her first job as a director of photography on the teen drama Playing with Good Children by Hideyuki Hirayama. We can already see what will become his signature style: simple frames and delicate work with natural light. 

Naturalistic strangeness

Akiko Ashizawa's career took a decisive turn in 2005 when she met Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of Cure (1997) or of Kairo (2001) then sought a new aesthetic, to break with that of the horror films that had, until then, made his reputation. Akiko Ashizawa offered Kurosawa a more realistic, often melancholic atmosphere, but with a feeling of unease – another characteristic of Ashizawa's image – which creates a slight impression of discomfort, as if everything were not as normal and real as one would like to believe, and that the fantastic and the horror of early Kurosawa were still very much present. Since Loft In 2005, Akiko Ashizawa and Kiyoshi Kurosawa had made ten films together. While the cinematographer is not listed in the cast of the Arioka Castle, the historical blockbuster by the Japanese master presented as a preview at the Cannes Film Festival – replaced by the genre film specialist and no less talented Yasuyuki Sasaki – she accompanies him for his more personal films, which require delicate lighting. 

Akiko Ashizawa subsequently mentored the next generation of Japanese filmmakers, beginning with Koji Fukada. For his science fiction film Sayonara (2015), set in the near future where Japan has become entirely uninhabitable following a massive nuclear disaster, she imbues the feature film with its melancholy and profound sadness, working with cool colors and soft lighting, in contrast to the spectacular effects to which the disaster film genre has accustomed us. As is often the case, cinematographer-director collaborations are long-standing relationships, and Akiko Ashizawa reunites with Fukada on The Sigh of the Waves (2018), a Japanese film shot on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. That same year, the cinematographer also shot the anthology film in the archipelago. Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2018: Journey, his first foray outside the Japanese film industry. An opportunity for another decisive encounter, this time with the Indonesian filmmaker Edwin, for whom Ashizawa films Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay CashAwarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2021, this romantic action comedy, a tribute to popular Asian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, allows Ashizawa to return to a world reminiscent of cinema. pink from her early work. For the film's visuals, the cinematographer opted for a very physical, tropical light that emphasizes the violence of the bodies while retaining the melancholic softness that remains her signature. Akiko Ashizawa has just continued her collaboration with Edwin on Sleep No More, presented at the last Berlin Film Festival. At 75, the cinematographer continues to reinvent herself, in Indonesia or the Philippines (for Diamonds in the Sand (by Janus Victoria in 2024). In Vietnam, however, it's a young cinematographer, 30-year-old Nguyen Phan Linh Dan, who is starting to make a name for herself. This year at Cannes, alongside Ashizawa, she received an "Angénieux Special Encouragement," an award given by the brand to a promising young talent. Two directors of photography from different generations and aesthetic backgrounds, but also two women from the Asian continent practicing the same profession. Like a passing of the torch, from one generation to the next.