A First for Japanese Cinema: SHUMEI Takes Best Film in Venice

What the Cinema & Arts Award Is

Alongside the festival's own Golden and Silver Lions, Venice hosts a number of officially affiliated awards. The Cinema & Arts Award is one of them, devised by the theatre and film director Alessio Nardin. What it looks for is the fusion of cinema with other arts — music, theatre, the performing arts.

Its past winners include Saint Omer (dir. Alice Diop), which also took the Silver Lion that year, Riefenstahl (dir. Andres Veiel) and Making Of (dir. Cédric Kahn) — a line of films that have gone on to be recognised internationally.

Given what the award is for, the fit is not accidental. A film that presented kabuki — a stage art particular to Japan — to the world in cinematic form took a prize that exists to recognise exactly that meeting of forms. The announcement itself puts it that way: this was, precisely, a Cinema & Arts award.

What the Citation Said

The published citation reads the film on two levels. On one, the daily life of the Ichikawa family, their public appearances, their private hours together. On the other, a theatrical ritual still alive and still being renewed within Japanese society. Miike, it says, moves between the two through refined composition and long takes.

At its centre is the succession ceremony itself. Around the moment when a new Danjūrō is proclaimed, the citation says, the film carefully examines the relationship between three things: the person, the figure on stage, and the social role. What emerges from it, in the citation's words, is the value of handing on a craft, the tension between tradition and innovation, and a meditation on inheritance passed from father to son.

Of the final stretch it says this: the power of kabuki as a total art form, brought to life by performance, arrives with overwhelming force — the extreme stylisation of the voice, the codified gesture, the vivid expressionism of make-up that transforms face and gaze, and the direct relationship between actor and audience. Its beauty, the citation concludes, is that of a painting.

In places it does not read like the work of someone meeting kabuki for the first time. It calls the vocal style extreme without treating that as a fault; it reads the make-up as expressionism rather than decoration; it notes the direct relationship between actor and audience. Each of those is a condition on which kabuki actually rests.

From the Director, Takashi Miike

On the award, director Takashi Miike issued the following comment: "A remarkable achievement — Danjūrō's achievement. I am happy that through film we could send out to the world the beauty of classical kabuki, and the severity of shūmei. Thank you, Venice International Film Festival."

It is a short statement, but note where it places its subject: not on himself. This was a prize for the film, not for direction, and what the film recorded was one actor taking on a name. That "severity" sits beside "beauty" in the same sentence says something true about what was filmed.

What Was Carried Untranslated Came Back (An Editorial View)

What follows is our own reading. The film's international title is SHUMEI, not Succession, not Inheritance: the act of taking on a name was carried abroad as a sound rather than swapped for the nearest English word. The first answer to that wager came back as a prize for the meeting of art forms. One can read it that way.

We would rather not treat the award itself as proof of kabuki's worth. Kabuki has continued for four hundred years without reference to prizes. What makes the citation worth reading is not that it praised kabuki, but that it tried to describe what was actually happening in front of it.

At the end of our earlier piece we wrote that what those two days would amount to was not yet clear. The award has not changed that view. What matters is what stayed with the people who saw that white-painted face in Venice. The prize is one clue among others — though it is, admittedly, a highly visible one.

In Japanese Cinemas from 25 September

SHUMEI opens in Japan on 25 September 2026. What the audience and the jury in Venice received first can now be judged at home. Stage greetings are scheduled for the opening day, 25 September, at Marunouchi Piccadilly in Tokyo, and on 26 September at Namba Parks Cinema in Osaka and Midland Square Cinema in Nagoya. Please check the official announcements for cinemas, times and the details of the stage greetings.