The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan's greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye.The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda's films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics.An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda's oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives.

Linda C. Ehrlich is an independent scholar who has published extensively about world cinema and about traditional theatre. Her books include: Cinematic Reveries (2013), The Cinema of Víctor Erice: An Open Window (2007), and the co-edited Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinemas of China and Japan (reprint 2008). Her commentaries appear on the Criterion DVD of The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, dir. Víctor Erice) and the Milestone Film and Video 25th-anniversary DVD/blu-ray of Maborosi (dir. Kore-eda Hirokau). In addition, she is an award-winning poet.Dr. Ehrlich has taught at Duke University, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Tennessee/Knoxville, and on two Semester-at-Sea voyages. She has lived in Japan for more than five years, and has interviewed the director twice.