Korean-Japanese director O Mipo received the 2026 Kurosawa Akira Award alongside Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, and she was in high spirits when she spoke with Variety shortly before the ceremony at Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. The event took place under the aegis of the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, and the award recognizes filmmakers of substantial achievement who represent the future of cinema.

O began her career in 1999 as a crew member, working as a script supervisor for director Obayashi Nobuhiko. Her first prize came at the 2002 Short Shorts Film Festival in Tokyo for her short "Eye." In 2005 her debut feature-length screenplay, "The Sakai's Happiness," won the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award, and she directed her first feature from that script. Her 2010 drama "Here Comes the Bride, My Mom!" took the grand prize at the Shindo Kaneto Awards, and her 2014 drama "The Light Shines Only There" was Japan's submission for the Academy Award for best foreign language film.

After the 2015 drama "Being Good," O stepped away from features to raise her two sons, though she contributed a segment to the 2022 international anthology "Tell It Like a Woman." She returned to features in 2024 with the coming-of-age drama "Living in Two Worlds" and followed it in 2025 with the eco-themed children's drama "How Dare You?"

The award caught her off guard. "When I heard that they were going to give me the award my first reaction was just pure surprise, or rather, disbelief," O says. "I couldn't believe it. I wondered if they'd made a mistake. But I gratefully accepted it, of course. I hadn't really made any big movies up to that point. I was just so happy that they found me out of all the directors in Japan."

O says the Japanese film industry is "overwhelmingly different" from the one she entered more than two decades ago, pointing to the growing number of female staff members and directors. The production culture has shifted too, she says, from a pyramid with directors at the top to a system where respect training is common and everyone stands on more or less equal footing in terms of rights.

Even so, she sees room to grow abroad. Although nearly 700 Japanese films are now released each year, she says she "can't help but feel that the overseas market hasn't really taken off yet." She wants her own work recognized internationally and hopes a wider range of Japanese films reaches festivals, and she says she would like to follow Kore-eda Hirokazu and Hamaguchi Ryusuke in making films abroad. "I want to go to Hollywood someday," she says.

O is unapologetic about her parallel career directing television commercials, saying no director in Japan can survive on movies alone, with most relying on streaming, TV dramas and advertising work. Her three-year hiatus to raise her children thinned out those offers, and she finds it ironic that returning to movies full time has left things "a bit bleak" financially. She also contrasts Japan with Hollywood, where directors are typically paid from the planning stage, while in Japan "you don't get a single yen at the planning stage."

On artificial intelligence, O says it "has already become an inseparable part of our lives, and that includes filmmaking," but she does not believe machines will replace human filmmakers. She tells her sons to keep asking themselves what they think and what they really want to do, adding that consulting AI can lead to richer results as long as a sense of self comes first.

She draws inspiration from her mentor Obayashi, the experimental filmmaker behind the 1977 cult sci-fi hit "House," which came out the year she was born. "He was always boldly taking on challenges," she says. "It's a constant battle but those challenges are like nourishment." Noting that Obayashi died at 82, Kurosawa at 88 and Shindo Kaneto at 100, the 49-year-old director sees decades ahead. "There was a gap in my career when I had children. But I'm making up for lost time. And with this award I feel I'm getting back on track."