Seeing Kabuki from within the film: Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho unmasks a dying art with intimacy, spectacle, and cinematic grace. We had the pleasure of meeting with the Japanese filmmaker at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.
The Quinzaine-designated beach at La Croisette is slowly coming to life. It is 10 a.m., and the sun is shining brightly already, telling you it is going to be a good day. Waves roll slowly towards the sandy beach as you wait for the Japanese director Lee Sang-il to arrive. “He will be here in 5 minutes,” and true to the Japanese word, Lee Sang-il arrives exactly in 5 minutes, dressed casually and yet carrying an air of chic coolness around him. He smiles. He is happy that his hard work on his idea of 15 years is finally seen by the audience at Quinzaine des cinéastes (Director’s Fortnight).
It could be called his most ambitious project: the film Kokuho (国宝) took him 15 years of putting the idea into a story and 3 months of shooting to give us a fantastic insight into the tradition of Kabuki, a traditional Japanese drama known for its stylized performances combining music, dance, and acting. With a history spanning over 400 years, it features elaborate costumes, dramatic makeup, and dynamic staging. The word “kabuki” is made up of three characters: ka (song), bu (dance), and ki (skill), reflecting the art’s expressive and theatrical nature. Originally seen as unconventional and bold, Kabuki remains a vibrant part of Japan’s cultural heritage.
Lee has brought Kabuki to life through the lens of cinema, asking whether centuries-old cultural forms can find renewed relevance with today’s audience.
It was Lee’s personal fascination of 15 years which evolved into a creative collaboration with novelist Yoshida Shūichi, whose fiction inspired the film’s narrative. They have worked together on earlier films like Villain and Rage to explore the dark side of human nature, but with Kokuho, it is a kind of love letter with deeper insights into generational shifts, class hierarchies, and the business of art in a modernizing Japan.
“Kabuki is not just an art form, it is a business,” said Lee. “It has families, hierarchies, conflicts. It’s like The Godfather, but for theatre.” He further explains that Kabuki, unlike Noh or Rakugo, thrives on spectacle. “It is dramatic, performative, hierarchical, and fiercely patriarchal. The world of Kabuki is dominated by elite family lineages, with skills and stage names passed from father to son.” Lee was captivated by this ‘invisible world’—the backroom politics, the generational pride, the fragility of legacy.
To show us the inner workings of Kabuki, Lee chose to cast mainstream actors with no prior training in the form. The lead, Ryo Yoshizawa, underwent over a year of physical and performance training, eventually transforming into the onnagata (a male actor playing female roles), exuding a haunting, doll-like femininity which is what Lee wanted to highlight as the story of Kikuo.
“It was a deliberate choice, a means to bridge the divide between Kabuki’s mystique and a younger, film-going demographic that might never consider attending a Kabuki performance. Besides, he had a transparency—he didn’t show where he came from. When he dressed as a woman, he looked like a doll. That was the image I needed,” said Lee. “I didn’t push the actors,” he says, when asked about the gruelling training period. “I simply told them: it’s your film. If you want to make it, you will.”
This film was shot over 3 months in Kyoto. It blends intimate behind-the-scenes drama with the grandeur of stage performances. The aesthetic is meticulous, almost reverent, each scene unfolding with the deliberate pacing of a Kabuki act. And yet, as director, he embraces cinema’s fluidity—using close-ups, pacing, and sound design to make Kabuki understandable on screen, mesmerising the audience and bringing them into the world of Kabuki.
At a time when attention spans are shrinking and streaming platforms nudge viewers toward speed-watching, the film dares to ask for three uninterrupted hours. Lee is aware of the gamble and the skepticism. “Whether it feels long or not will depend on how people talk about it,” he says. “If they say, ‘It didn’t feel like three hours,’ that’s what will bring others to see it.”
The language of the film is Kansaiben (set in the Kansai region). “Kansai is a little cooler, a bit smaller,” he notes. “At the time the novel was written, Kabuki was already declining, and Kansai was trying to recover.”
There is a decline in the audience going to watch Kabuki in Japan, and to this Lee said, “Kabuki performances are prohibitively expensive for many, especially young people. Tickets can cost nearly ten times more than a movie ticket. Even for a nation known for preserving its heritage, Kabuki has become a luxury.” He added, “Young people are poor in Japan today—they can’t afford Kabuki. And even if they could, they’re intimidated by it. It feels like something they need to already understand, and they don’t want to feel ignorant.”
Hence, his belief in casting popular actors, simplifying the visual vocabulary of Kabuki, and setting it within a cinematic narrative: he lowers the “threshold of entry” for a new generation. Cinema becomes the middle path between preservation and evolution.
Despite its heavy theme and length (174 minutes), Kokuho manages to avoid didactics. There is no monologue mourning the death of tradition, but there are silences, glances, and moments of vulnerability between characters—showing expectation, legacy, or fear. As Lee states, tradition cannot be frozen in time, but it can be reinterpreted, reframed, and passed on like a story. The process may be imperfect, even painful, but it is also essential.
“In my other films,” he adds, “I often show the darkness in people. But in Kokuho, I wanted to show both the darkness and the beauty.” He is not campaigning for Kabuki’s salvation, nor does he see himself as a cultural saviour. If anything, he is documenting emotion—capturing the moment when something old meets something new, and both emerge changed.
Our reporters are on the ground in Cannes, France, to bring you exclusive content from the 78th Cannes Film Festival—explore our coverage here.
