Japanese director Masato Harada studied filmmaking in London and worked as a film critic in Los Angeles before he made his 1979 directorial debut Goodbye Flickmania, a Howard Hawks homage. After making films in the U.S.—including sci-fi cult hit Gunhed (1989) and Painted Desert (1993)—he returned to Japan to make the modern classic Kamikaze Taxi (1994), his first collaboration with Koji Yakusho. A master storyteller in the tradition of Akira Kurosawa, he has been chosen to receive the New York Asian Film Festival’s Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. In this master class, he will discuss his career, the state of contemporary Japanese cinema, and the role of cinema in public discourse.