Kiyoshi Kurosawa (黒沢 清, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, born July 19, 1955) is a Japanese film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is best known for his many contributions to the Japanese horror genre.

Biography

Born in Kobe on July 19, 1955, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not related to director Akira Kurosawa. After studying at Rikkyo University in Tokyo under the guide of prominent film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, where he began making 8mm films, Kurosawa began directing commercially in the 1980s, working on pink films and low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza films.

In the early 1990s, Kurosawa won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute and was able to study filmmaking in the United States, although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.

Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his 1997 crime thriller film Cure. Also that year, he experimented by filming two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent's Path and Eyes of the Spider, both of which shared the same premise (a father taking revenge for his child's murder) and lead actor (Show Aikawa) but spun entirely different stories.

Kurosawa followed up Cure with a semi-sequel in 1999 with Charisma, a detective film starring Koji Yakusho. In 2001, he directed the horror film Pulse. Kurosawa released Bright Future, starring Tadanobu Asano, Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, in 2003. He followed this with another digital feature, Doppelganger, later the same year.

In 2005, Kurosawa returned with Loft, his first love story since Seance. Another horror film, Retribution, followed in the next year. With his 2008 film, Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa was considered to step "out of his usual horror genre and into family drama."

He has written a novelization of his own film Pulse, as well as a history of horror cinema with Makoto Shinozaki.

Kurosawa directed a 2012 five-part television drama Penance. Beautiful 2013, an anthology film featuring Kurosawa's Beautiful New Bay Area Project, screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2013.

Kurosawa's next feature film Real, which stars Takeru Sato and Haruka Ayase, was released in 2013. Seventh Code will screen at the Rome Film Festival later that year. In September 2012, it was announced that he will direct 1905, a film starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Shota Matsuda and Atsuko Maeda.