Maha Harada spent two decades building scenes on the page before she ever stood behind a camera. Now 64, the best-selling Japanese author is making her feature directorial debut with “In My Father’s Room,” a film adapted from her own short story “An Unnecessary Man,” and it arrives in competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival before moving on to the Busan International Film Festival. Ahead of both stops, Bitters End has already sold the film to France, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, with more territories under discussion.
The transition from novels to film feels less like a leap than a continuation, Harada says. Her years working as a museum curator shaped how she writes long before she considered directing. She describes the short story as an ordinary, universal story of a father and daughter, deliberately free of mysteries, schemes or sensual drama.
That story follows Satomi, an art museum worker who learns almost nothing about her father, Yuichi, until after he has died alone. Harada says the character grew directly out of her own family. Her father sold art books, loved film and gambling, and “never stopped causing trouble,” she says, but he also introduced her to Picasso at age 10 and took her to see “Gone with the Wind” and “The Castle of Sand” at 12.
It was only once he was gone, she says, that she understood how much he had taught her. Central to the film is the idea that Yuichi’s value cannot be measured by his usefulness to society, a theme Harada says she wanted to explore directly. She adds that Yuichi’s willingness to die alone, having chased only what mattered to him, could be seen as extreme, but says no one can call his life anything other than happy.
Visually, Harada built the film around two anchors: the Japanese tea ceremony, or chanoyu, and a painting by Mark Rothko. She wanted to bring the ceremony’s quiet, everyday symbolism to the screen, and to pair it with Rothko’s work as a Western counterpart to that same sense of beauty. She notes that Japanese museums collectively hold 10 works by Rothko, acquired by curators who recognized the artist’s spiritual quality decades before his prices climbed, a fact that still makes her proud.
Moving from prose to a film set meant giving up some control, Harada says. Before filming began, she recalls, her assistant director read the script and asked her, “Isn’t there too much stage direction?” The comment made her realize that a novel is, in her words, almost entirely stage direction, with the writer controlling every detail the reader sees. On a film set, other collaborators have to be given room to interpret.
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