Hirokazu Koreeda was born in 1962 in Tokyo. He graduated from the Faculty of Literature of the Waseda University and, despite initially wanting to be a writer, he began working for TV Man Union, a major Japanese television production company. There, during the 1990s, he made several internationally acclaimed documentaries.
His first feature film, The Light of Illusion (1995), won the Golden Lion at the 1995 Venice Film Festival.
Since then, he has been nominated for several international awards, such as the Oscar for Best International Foreign Film for Shoplifters (2018), a film that also earned the Japanese director the Palme D'or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
His most recent film Broker (2018) won the Best Actor award at this year's Cannes Film Festival and is part of the official selection of the LEFFEST.