The Japanese director, Genki Kawamura, and the actress, Mieko Harada, gave a press conference yesterday to discuss A Hundred Flowers, which is competing in the Official Selection. It deals with the subject of dementia, and Kawamura, who also adapted a novel of his own to write the script, said that he had used his own grandmother as a model for the idea he had for the film. “Seven years ago my grandmother began to suffer from Alzheimer’s and she could no longer recognize me. I realised that although she forgot a lot of things, the flowers that she saw in different places meant that she began to remember things. That is why it is called A Hundred Flowers because these flowers help her to remember different periods in her life.”

The prestigious actress, Mieko Harada, who has worked with legendary directors like Akira Kurosawa, revealed that she also had the same experience with her own mother. “For many years I watched how she behaved, so in this film I wanted to reproduce everything I had observed in her.”