Drive My Car won the Best Non-English Language Film in Oscar 2022

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "Drive My Car" won the best international film at the 94th Oscars announced at Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, after the film won 3 awards in Cannes Film Festival last year and also received the best picture in non-English language category at the 79th Golden Globe Awards in January. 

Based on a short story by a world-renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, starring by Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Reika Kirishima , Masaki Okada, Park Yoo Rim, Jin Dae-Yeon, Sonia Yuan and many actors with 6 spoken languages like English, Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese and Korean Sign Language, represents as an Asian film from Japan in global stages during the pandemic.

It's said that a new phenomenon is emerged in America when the "Hate Asian crime" became a big issue few years ago, Lee Isaac Chung’s "Minari" depicts the story of an Asian immigrant in US by Korean and English was nominated for the best foreign-language film at the Golden Globes as well as Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite"  won the Oscars, a very first Asian film for the top award with the storyline about an unknown immigrant poor class, the gap between rich and poor society who living like a refugee family in a modern city of Seoul, which is unexpected to hear from what we could imagine by the beautiful global hit KPOP's faces. "Drive My Car" capture a roadtrip story through the relationship between a director named Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) who lose his wife and his car driver, Misaki Watari (Toko Miura). He directs a multilingual production of Anton Chekhov’s "Uncle Vanya" with many Asian actors from different countries who speaking their own language and they even can't understand each other during rehearsals.

Between the borderlines and spaces, both actors and audiences could understand each other through the sounds and the way they attempted to send their emotional messages from heart which could be read by heart, to reflect a sense of Asian aesthetic. "Drive My Car" won the Oscars award after a Japanese film Yojiro Takita's "Departure" (Okuribito) last 13 years ago.

Text: #inStyleAsia
Images: AFLO, Getty images