Guest of Honour

Kiyoshi Kurosawa at Imagine 2026

We’re very excited about this year’s Guest of Honour, renowned Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa!

Kurosawa will be receiving a well-deserved Career Achievement Award at Imagine, and he will be joining us on stage for a Career Talk about his oeuvre. Besides his latest feature The Samurai and the Prisoner, we will be screening his previous films Cure, Pulse and Creepy, as well as his film of choice, The Boston Strangler.

Tickets for the Career Talk are available through the button below per 6 October.

Career Talk: Tickets

About Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa – one of the great filmmakers in contemporary Japanese cinema – has worked across all kinds of genres, but his distinct director’s signature is ever-present. While initially recognised as a horror director, his earliest work already blends genres, setting his films apart from the J-horror wave of the time. He merges horror and thriller, while supernatural elements can be found in both his arthouse and horror films. 

Born in Kobe in 1955, Kurosawa studied at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, where he started making 8mm films. He kicked off his professional career with pink films and low-budget yakuza films. With a scholarship from the Sundance Institute, he studied filmmaking in the US, followed by his international breakthrough with crime thriller Cure (1997). 

Many of his films after that were screened and awarded in Tokyo, Cannes, Venice, Busan and Berlin: Charisma(1999), Pulse (2001), Bright Future and Doppelgänger (both 2003). Meanwhile, Kurosawa kept busy in other genres such as family drama (Tokyo Sonata, 2008) and romantic fantasy (Journey to the Shore, 2015). He received a Silver Lion in Venice for his spy film Wife of a Spy in 2020, and his latest feature, period mystery The Samurai and the Prisoner, became this year’s highest grossing Japanese film at the local box office.  

Kurosawa’s work deals with loneliness and existential dread, whilst also commenting on contemporary Japanese society. Ghosts are omnipresent in his stories, whether in the traditional sense, or as haunted cities or ghosts we can find within ourselves. In Kurosawa’s world, technical progress and modern society pull humans apart rather than bringing them together. His cinema is deeply humanist: his focus is on everyday people taking on societal pressures, trying to keep their dignity intact as they fight their own inner demons.

About Imagine’s Guest of Honour

Every year, Imagine invites a genre hero to the festival as our Guest of Honour. From director to costume designers and from producers to special effects artists: we love honouring the people behind our favourite films, books and games. The Guest of Honour receives a Career Achievement Award at the festival and usually also hosts a Career Talk. On top of that, we often show a few of the guest’s favourite films as well as films they’ve worked on. Previous Guests of Honour include Ben Wheatley, Phil Tippett, Roger Corman, Paul Verhoeven, Tim Burton, Rutger Hauer, Lindy Hemming, Neil Jordan, Dario Argento, Terry Gilliam, Wes Craven, Udo Kier, Ray Harryhausen and Dick Maas.

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