Bilal Kawazoe’s film ‘Whole’ tackles the experience of being mixed race in JapanPosted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive on 2021-10-03 01:29Z by Steven |
Bilal Kawazoe’s film ‘Whole’ tackles the experience of being mixed race in Japan
The Japan Times
2021-09-30
Mark Schilling, Film Critic
 In Bilal Kawazoe’s ‘Whole,’ Usman Kawazoe (left) and Kai Sandy (right) play two biracial men who bond over coming to terms with their identity while living in Japan. |
In Japanese, the word “hāfu” — a colloquial term for people who are half-Japanese — is a label that some accept, but others reject, preferring such terms as “daburu” (double) or “mikkusu” (mix).
So seeing the title of Bilal Kawazoe’s new film “Whole,” which tells the story of two biracial men of radically different backgrounds in Kobe who become friends, my first thought was that Kawazoe, who is of Japanese and Pakistani parentage, had come up with yet another alternative to the hāfu label.
Not so, as he explains in a video call. The title instead refers to the characters’ quests to become “whole” in terms of their identity. Kawazoe says his brother, Usman, came to him with the idea of “making a film based on the identity crises and the experiences of mixed people in Japan.”
“We did a lot of research and realized there wasn’t really a narrative film (on that theme),” he continues. Instead, they found films that were “quite stereotypical or just one-sided.”
“So we kind of felt this sense of responsibility to make an honest film on this whole mixed-race experience,” he says…
Read the entire review here.