Kei Ishikawa on adapting Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of the Hills: 'Was interested in how trauma, pain are passed'

Japanese filmmaker Kei Ishikawa has drawn international attention with his screen adaptation of ‘A Pale View of Hills’, the 1982 debut novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

The film, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and has been featured at other major festivals, explores memory, trauma and the enduring effects of history on family life. The project is an international co-production involving Japan, the United Kingdom and Poland, and is scheduled for wider release in the UK and Ireland in 2026. It stars Suzu Hirose, Fumi Nikaido, Yoh Yoshida and Camilla Aiko.

In a recent interview with Mint, Ishikawa outlined the central theme he wanted to bring to the film. He said that the most important idea was how memory is shaped not by objective truth, but by “guilt, love, and the need to survive.”

Read excerpts from the interview:

What was the most important theme you wanted to highlight in your adaptation of A Pale View of Hills, especially regarding memory and family across generations?

The central theme I wanted to explore was how memory is shaped by guilt, love, and the need to survive, rather than by objective truth. In A Pale View of Hills, memory is not something stable or reliable—it is something we reconstruct in order to keep living.

I was particularly interested in how trauma and unspoken pain are passed down across generations, often without words. The film looks at a mother and daughter, but also at how history—war, migration, and loss—silently inhabits family relationships. What is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is unconsciously rewritten all become part of how a family continues to exist.

Rather than asking whether the memories are true or false, I wanted the audience to feel why a person needs to remember things in a certain way.

How did you balance staying true to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel while also adding your own directorial vision to the story?

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel has a very restrained surface, but underneath it there is deep emotional violence and ambiguity. My priority was to remain faithful to the novel’s emotional logic, rather than its literal structure.

At the same time, cinema requires different tools. I introduced my own perspective by emphasizing physical presence, silence, and visual memory—things that cannot be fully expressed through language. I was careful not to explain too much. Like the novel, the film invites the audience to sense what is missing.

I see adaptation not as translation, but as a dialogue across time, culture, and medium. I tried to listen closely to what the novel was whispering, and then respond to it honestly as a filmmaker.

How do you usually choose the stories you want to tell in your films?

I’m drawn to stories where people are emotionally trapped, often by family roles or social expectations. I don’t choose stories because they are dramatic on the surface, but because they contain quiet contradictions—moments where characters don’t fully understand themselves.

If a story makes me uncomfortable or forces me to question my own assumptions, that’s usually a sign it’s worth pursuing.

About the novel

The novel, which spans post-war Nagasaki in the 1950s and England in the 1980s, centres on Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living in England who reflects on her life as a young wife and mother in Nagasaki.

Her recollections of past events and relationships reveal the psychological legacy of loss and heartbreak, interwoven with collective historical trauma following the atomic bombing. In the book, these reflections are deeply personal and ambiguous, inviting the reader to question what is remembered and what is forgotten.

Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation of ‘A Pale View of Hills’ represents a thoughtful and evocative translation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel into cinematic form. By emphasising memory, emotional truth and visual storytelling, he has created a film that honours the spirit of the original work while expressing his own artistic voice.