Two directors with films at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival said they once kept impending or new motherhood hidden from the people they worked with, at a festival talk on raising children while making films. Belgium-based Teodora Ana Mihai, whose “Heysel 85” plays in competition, shared the stage with Japanese director Sode Yukiko, whose “All the Lovers in the Night” debuted at Cannes and screens in Tokyo’s Gala Selection. The Tokyo Talks session in the festival’s TIFF Lounge was moderated by Kondo Kanako of the festival’s programming team and came with childcare for attendees, with babysitters minding a roomful of infants at the back of the venue.
The tots periodically made their presence felt, vocally. Sode spoke publicly about hiding the birth of her second child at a 2021 festival talk with Indonesian director Kamila Andini. She had kept the news even from producers she trusted, convinced the offers would stop once people knew she had a newborn.
That daughter starts elementary school in April, and “All the Lovers in the Night” is Sode’s first theatrical feature in five years, following “Aristocrats.” “The situation in Japan’s film world has changed a little,” Sode said. She decided early that she would not pick between motherhood and a profession she considers her passion, but fear of social rules pushed the decision to start a family late. Once pregnant, she told few people in the business.
Since it was winter and she was quite thin at the time, she was still hiding the pregnancy under her clothes at six months. Sode noted the contrast with men, who on announcing a partner’s pregnancy simply receive congratulations and a nudge to work harder. I really did nothing else but work and be a mom, work and be a mom.” From the time Mihai became a mother, her own mother traveled with her to shoots and looked after the children, leaving the director free of worry.
Sode lives in Kanazawa with her husband, who travels to Tokyo often for work, while she moves to the capital alone for around six months at a time when shooting, away from her children. She compared the arrangement to a married couple running the course on “Sasuke,” the Japanese obstacle-course TV competition. Sode was unable to get her first child into daycare, a setback that brought her career to a complete stop and was one reason the family left Tokyo.
Her daughter, now almost 9, visits the set on hand-picked days and has appointed herself an unofficial assistant, getting to know the cast and crew. Sode’s children have never come to her sets. You have to keep shooting fast in a short amount of time, and the budget is a big part of that,” she said.
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