Kawase has also made several acclaimed narrative features, including the quiet but deeply moving Cannes award winning Mourning Forest, but her reputation was forged with her documentary work. Essentially abandoned by both her long missing father and the birth mother who relinquished Kawase to her great aunt Uno (whom she calls Grandma), the filmmaker struggles with a sense of rootlessness in Embracing. Having traced her father’s whereabouts, she would like to re-establish contact, but her great aunt-grandmother-mother is against it. Somewhat conflicted, Kawase reconstructs her early childhood, but all she really has are a few old photographs and official census registrations. Ultimately, such evidence makes notions of family seem rather arbitrary, especially through Kawase’s warped lens.
Following the birth of her own child, Kawase examines her relationship with her adopted mother, directly rebuking the elderly woman’s emotional distance on-camera at critical juncture in Tarachime. Indeed, Kawase turns her focus away from nothing, including her son’s delivery, scenes of her great aunt in the ambulance and emergency room during a health scare, as well as brutally up-close shots of the ninety year old woman’s naked body.
