Q&A with director Masato Harada, who will receive the Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award

This sweeping epic delves into Japanese history’s bloodiest battle, fought on a single day in 1600, with losses of 30,000 people. Sekigahara teems with historical characters and enough Machiavellian maneuvering and exciting action for an entire miniseries. But the focus is squarely on the motives and strategies of two towering figures whose forces meet for the final showdown: Mitsunari Ishida and Ieyasu Tokugawa (a scheming Koji Yakusho). Harada’s powerful, Kurosawa-like reinterpretation overturns conventional understanding of their motives, transforming their fateful conflict into a war between justice and political opportunism. New York Premiere