The 20-year-old Japanese filmmaker talks about his award-winning short film “Mother’s Recipe” that was inspired by his migration experience.

“I’m from Shibuya in Tokyo, Japan. It’s one of the busiest and liveliest parts of Tokyo. It’s a very hectic area with lots of tourists coming in. The place where I grew up is especially famous for its fashion. You can also find many architectural companies there.

My parents are architects, so I guess I had a lot of art input from them. As a kid growing up in Japan, I was very into the arts and creating stuff. I started drawing when I was three. I also did 3D models and played the guitar and drums from a very young age.

When I was 11, we moved to Singapore. I can’t say it was my choice. We migrated because of my mum’s job. My mum studied abroad, so she knows how to speak and communicate in English. I guess she wanted that for me as well.

I was hesitant to move to Singapore at first. I didn’t speak English, and all my friends and family were back in Japan. I felt isolated in Singapore. For the first two years, I didn’t really pay attention in class. I played a lot of online games and questioned why I was here.

I got into this very comfortable routine of going straight home after school to watch movies. I had developed a passion for filmmaking, and I started making travel-related content for my YouTube channel. I guess that became my coping mechanism living in a different country.

Nine years ago, there wasn’t a lot of information on filmmaking in Japanese, so I started to actively learn in English. I attended filmmaking seminars by Apple, and even started my own filmmaking club at XCL World Academy, which was the international school I went to.

Filmmaking became a serious career option because of my mentor Eric Khoo, a renowned filmmaker in Singapore. I’ve been working under him for five years now. I was his storyboard artist, bilingual script supervisor and behind-the-scenes videographer on different projects.

When I went to Japan for Eric’s film Spirit World, I saw a whole village of people working together to create this film. Stepping into that professional world made me realise that I wanted to do this for life. That motivated my decision to go to film school in New York.

Mother’s Recipe is actually a video I submitted to apply for film school. It tells the story of a Japanese boy who had just moved to Singapore. He wandered into a hawker center and forged this unexpected bond with a cook through the universal language of food.

Because it’s such a personal project, I wanted someone who could capture the feelings of my experience moving here. I needed to work with someone I know, so I casted my younger brother as the main actor.

Thanks to Mother’s Recipe,I was accepted into the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. The film also won Best Short Award – in the under 25 category – at the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia. That’s significant because it’s an Academy-qualifying film festival.

What’s really amazing is that the winner of the award got the opportunity to be aired on Japan Airlines. Mother’s Recipe was actually shown to passengers as part of their in-flight entertainment. It’s crazy.

I am very appreciative of the awards, but status or popularity is not my ultimate goal or objective in this industry. I think connecting with people through my work and reading really warm comments from them means more to me.

However, getting recognition means having more credibility as a filmmaker, and that creates more opportunities to work on bigger and better productions. That is why I decided to revisit Mother’s Recipe.

I’m currently busy with the post-production for the full version of the short film. Because the first one was for a university application, it had a limitation of five minutes. But I had so much I wanted to tell, five minutes wasn’t really enough.

So after going to NYU for a year and learning new skills that could make it better, I have decided to come back to it and tell a full story this time. My crew and I didn’t sleep for a whole week  to make this, so I’m excited for the audience to see it.

Do I consider Singapore home? That’s a very complex question to answer. Having lived in many different parts of the world now, I would say that home is not a specific place, but where the people you love are.

What I do love about Singapore is how different people come together here, unlike Japan which is super monoethnic. When I went to international school in Singapore, I realised everyone is kind of an alien like me, and we’re aliens coming together to form a community.

Singapore forced me to step out of my comfort zone, and it’s only now that I realise how important that is for you to grow as a person. Singapore opened doors and let me down paths to where I am now. I’ll always love Singapore for that.” – Izumo Kawabe 

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