Murakami Hiroyasu (Director)
Filming without Reservation
At what point did you decide to make a film of your father’s end of life care?
The impetus was deciding that I wanted to create a motivation for myself to take a more proactive role in his care. To explain things in order, when my father’s condition became terminal and it became necessary to care for him at home, I had to have a lot of conversations with my mother. Precisely because these were serious conversations, we ended up arguing over trivial things, and the stress mounted. On top of all this, my family home was in Sendai, but I was living in Tokyo, and the time and expense of traveling home was also becoming a bother. When I thought about how to sustain my motivation as a caregiver, I came up with the idea of turning the experience into a film. I make films, and so I thought that approaching the situation as a film project might improve my attitude, and I started shooting.
I was uncertain if this situation could actually be made into a film, but I felt the material come together once I started shooting, and the caregiving process even started to become enjoyable. I actually began filming with the assisted bathing scene that appears early on. I was impressed by the way that the nursing staff carried out their work, setting up a bath in the tiny kitchen and washing my father’s body. They worked so smoothly, and I was really touched. It also filmed well, and I thought about how more and more people would likely have this same kind of experience in the future.
So, you decided to make a film out of this after seeing the nurses at work?
That’s right. I also had opportunities to talk with the nurses and helpers involved in my father’s care, and from those conversations I grew increasingly interested in the realities of Japan’s aging society. This was also a big factor. I came to think that, through my father I could portray the issues facing our aging society.
But more than this, my biggest motivation was the thought of being able to take a close look at human death. Today, it is difficult to observe death, even within the family. Most people die in hospitals or other facilities. It’s not uncommon to learn of a death without having had the chance to visit the hospital. So, it’s not the best way of putting it, but I thought that giving end of life care to my father at home was a good opportunity. As a filmmaker, I wanted to capture how my father died and what effects this had on my family.
What was the reaction of your parents when you started to film?
Even though they were my parents, I had no intention of forcing my father or mother to be filmed against their will. Especially in the case of my father, I think it must have been unpleasant to be filmed while on the verge of death. But in the end, neither of them refused the camera.
When I first started filming, my father would glance at the camera, but he wouldn’t say anything in particular. Even my mother didn’t really question me. Of course, it’s possible that my father lacked the strength and my mother the wherewithal to ask me any questions, but on the other hand, neither of them changed their behavior in front of the camera. They just behaved as always, and encountering their naturalness enabled me, as their son, to continue filming naturally.
It goes without saying, but you experience a certain reservation in filming documentaries. Basically, the people you film are “others” at a distance from yourself, and it’s always a matter of feeling out how far to go. But this time there was no such reservation, in a good sense, and I was able to film freely.
So, you were able to shoot in an authentic, real way because your subjects were family?
Yes, but I would like to resist reducing this to simply being about what is “real.” Many people, including nursing care professionals, have looked at My Blue Heaven and said, “this is real caregiving.” But many scenes in the film are not “real” and could in fact be called “staged.”
First there’s the opening. The film begins with a phone call from my mother saying she’s decided to care for my father at home. But I couldn’t have shot that phone conversation without knowing in advance that she was going to call. So, I didn’t film that scene at the time, but rather I had my mother recreate the phone call after the fact. The same was true of the scene on the morning after my father’s death where the dragonflies come flying around. A swarm of dragonflies actually did come flying around the house the morning after his death, but incorporating that material into the film required some staging (what I call “invention”). Before the scene with the dragonflies, my mother talks about a saying that dragonflies come to carry off the souls of the dead. But I had looked that up, and then I asked my mother to talk about it. Just inserting the dragonfly scene would have felt out of place, so I decided to create this kind of premise to lend a sense of necessity to the dragonflies. In a sense, I think that all documentaries are made up of material captured by chance. Transforming that chance into necessity within the context of a film is core to my documentary filmmaking practice.
I also exercised some invention for the scene showing the creatures in the garden. There’s a shot of a large snail on a leaf, for example, but I shot that in Bali, Indonesia, so I used footage that I shot on different occasions. I also used audio of bird calls that I had recorded in Bali. I worked these in with the aim of emphasizing a symmetry between the fertility of life in the garden and my father on the verge of death. In other words, I wanted viewers to unconsciously sense the image of a paradise-like afterlife encroaching right outside the room where my father was sleeping.
I also found the editing to be very skillful. When we initially see your mother devoting herself to your father’s care, I found myself thinking that your parents must be close, but midway through we learn that their relationship was rocky and they even had a period when they weren’t talking to each other. Our view here changes dramatically.
This is another example of invention. I knew that my parents didn’t get along well, but I didn’t want to let the audience know right away and only revealed their relationship halfway through the film, which creates new emotions in the viewer. Creating this kind of midway turning point actually comes from screenwriting theory for narrative films. When I was young, I wanted to be a narrative film director and studied screenwriting assiduously. I ultimately ended up making documentaries, but even in documentaries, the structural principles of narrative screenwriting can be quite useful. I believe that documentary filmmakers should actively study dramatic structure from fiction films.
In your previous films, including Tokyo High Tide (2019) and Planet of the Crabs (2019), the protagonists are also generally older people, and this film’s protagonist was the elderly person closest to you. Is there a reason why you are drawn to the elderly?
My films tend to feature elderly people and water. We find the latter in the opening scene of the sea and the scene where my father gets bathed. In a more abstract sense, you could say that the film is set along the mythological Sanzu River separating the world of the living from the afterlife (laughs). There is in fact a strong connection between the elderly and water. Water is the origin of life, a place teeming with living things, and civilizations were born along shores. Elderly people, by contrast, do not have much time left and cannot help but be conscious of death. The elderly and water can become motifs to show the contrast between life and death. I think my films will continue to feature these elements.
Compiled by Wakabayashi Ryo
Translated by Ryan Cook
Photography: Oshita Yumi / Editorial supervisor: Sato Hiroaki / 2025-10-14