Kiyoshi Kurosawa (黒沢 清 Kurosawa Kiyoshi) is a Japanese filmmaker.

Of no relation to famed Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa was born in 1955 and got his start directing in the 1980s, working on low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza pictures. In the early 1990s Kurosawa won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute, and was able to study filmmaking in America although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.

Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his hypnotic serial killer film Cure (1997). Also that year, Kurosawa experimented by filming two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent's Path and Eyes of the Spider, both of which shared the same premise (a father taking revenge for his child's murder) and lead actor (Sho Aikawa) but spun entirely different stories.

Kurosawa followed up Cure with a semi-sequel, Charisma (1999), which established his penchant for apocalyptic imagery and themes of identity and isolation. In 2001 Kurosawa directed Kairo (aka Pulse, Circuit), a bleak and striking horror film about ghosts invading the world of the living via the Internet. More recently Kurosawa has released Bright Future (2003), starring Tadanobu Asano; this is his first film shot using a 24P HiDef camera. Kurosawa followed this with another digital feature, Dopperugengâ, later the same year.

Kurosawa's directing style has been compared to that of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, though he has never expressly listed those directors as influences. In interviews Kurosawa has voiced admiration for American films of the early 1970s.

Many of his films are concerned in some form with the way society shapes the individual, with individuals obsessed with some eccentric project, or how social mechanisms disintegrate when faced with the wholly irrational. Cure is widely cited as the best example of all of these conceits in one film, but they show up in others as well: Bright Future combines the first and second in its plot about a ruminative young man trying to accommodate a jellyfish to live in fresh water, with unexpected results.

Japanese film directors | J-Horror | Living people

黒沢清 | Kiyoshi Kurosawa