Ken Watanabe, Tomokazu Miura in The Unbroken
Setsuro Wakamatsu’s drama The Unbroken was voted the best Japanese film of 2009 at the Japanese Academy Awards ceremony, which was held in Tokyo on March 5.
In the controversial drama, best actor winner Ken Watanabe plays an airline union leader fighting for stricter safety regulations following an air crash that left hundreds dead. Corporate corruption, however, gets in the way. The Unbroken was clearly inspired by the Japan Airlines flight 123 crash in 1985, the worst in Japan's aviation history.
Veteran cinematographer Daisaku Kimura (Tidal Wave, The Beast Shall Die) was voted best director for his directorial debut, The Summit: A Chronicle of Stones, which earned Teruyuki Kagawa the best supporting actor award for his role as a mountain guide. The tale of an attempt to climb a virgin peak in the early 1900s, The Summit: A Chronicle of Stones won a total of six awards, including best cinematography (also Kimura) and best score (Shinichirô Ikebe).
Takako Matsu won the best actress award for playing the title role in the period drama Villon’s Wife, which chronicles the difficulties faced by the wife of a self-destructive writer (Tadanobu Asano).
For the second consecutive year, the best supporting actress was Kimiko Yo, this time for Dear Doctor. (Last year, Yo took home the award for her performance in the Academy Award-winning drama Departures.) Dear Doctor also won the best screenplay award for Miwa Nishikawa, the film's director-screenwriter and writer of the original novel. Dear Doctor tells the story of a village doctor (best actor nominee Tsurube Shofukutei) who is exposed as a con artist, though the locals don't seem too concerned about it.
The best animated feature was Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars, while Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino was voted the best foreign film.