Sons of our fathers: Hirokazu Kore-eda turns focus to nature-nurture debate

There aren't many directors who can withstand comparison to one of the great masters of cinema. But Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, at least in the eyes of the critics, appears to be the natural successor to his fellow countryman - and director of the celebrated Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu.

Of course, as soon as this is suggested, Kore-eda blushes. "Well, I'm not sure about that!" he says, when we meet to talk about his latest film, Like Father, Like Son. Yet there's no denying that, like Ozu, the 51-year-old Kore-eda returns, again and again, to examine the minutia of Japanese family life.

Think of 2004's Nobody Knows, which deals with four children slipping towards desperation in a Tokyo apartment after their mother abandons them. Or I Wish (2011), with its portrayal of two brothers who wish to reconcile their divorced parents. "Maybe family is an eternal subject for me," Kore-eda says.

It's certainly a fruitful one. This year, Like Father, Like Son won the Jury Prize at Cannes - a sign that Kore-eda is now considered among world cinema's elite filmmakers. With Steven Spielberg at the head of the jury, Kore-eda then saw Spielberg's company DreamWorks snap up the US remake rights for the film. "I was so impressed by its power to bring such a human story to the screen," says Spielberg, whose own body of work is also full of family-oriented themes and stories.

In Like Father, Like Son, Kore-eda circles again around issues of abandonment and separation, albeit using a premise that feels ripped from the scripts of such American daytime soap staples as General Hospital. The film begins with an upwardly mobile couple, the Nonomiyas, discovering that six-year-old Keita (Keita Ninomiya) is not their son as a result of a mix-up at the hospital where he was born. Keita's real parents are the working-class Saikis, who have been raising the Nonomiyas' child, Ryusei (Shogen Hwang), as their own.

Rather than focus on the mothers (played by Machiko Ono and Yoko Maki), Kore-eda turns his attention to the two fathers and their reaction to this shock.