Why Directors Teodora Ana Mihai and Sode Yukiko Kept Motherhood Secret From Colleagues: ‘I Needed to Prove Myself Three Times More’

Two directors with films at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival said they once kept impending or new motherhood hidden from the people they worked with, at a festival talk on raising children while making films.

Belgium-based Teodora Ana Mihai, whose “Heysel 85” plays in competition, shared the stage with Japanese director Sode Yukiko, whose “All the Lovers in the Night” debuted at Cannes and screens in Tokyo’s Gala Selection. The Tokyo Talks session in the festival’s TIFF Lounge was moderated by Kondo Kanako of the festival’s programming team and came with childcare for attendees, with babysitters minding a roomful of infants at the back of the venue. The tots periodically made their presence felt, vocally.

Sode spoke publicly about hiding the birth of her second child at a 2021 festival talk with Indonesian director Kamila Andini. She had kept the news even from producers she trusted, convinced the offers would stop once people knew she had a newborn. That daughter starts elementary school in April, and “All the Lovers in the Night” is Sode’s first theatrical feature in five years, following “Aristocrats.”

“The situation in Japan’s film world has changed a little,” Sode said. “I’ve started to hear quite often that female directors a bit younger than me have had children, and for crew members too, I feel it has become more possible to choose to give birth than it was five years ago.”

Mihai, who won the festival’s special jury prize in 2021 for “La Civil” and returned in 2024 with best actress winner “Traffic,” was 37 when her daughter was born. She decided early that she would not pick between motherhood and a profession she considers her passion, but fear of social rules pushed the decision to start a family late. Once pregnant, she told few people in the business. Since it was winter and she was quite thin at the time, she was still hiding the pregnancy under her clothes at six months.

“I was really conflicted with myself, because I was already feeling like a bad mother, because I was hiding something so beautiful and actually so natural,” Mihai said. “The censorship came also from me and my mentality, because that’s how we grew up thinking.”

Because her firstborn was a daughter, Mihai said she wanted to become an example that the two roles can be combined, so that female colleagues and later generations would find a different environment. Sode noted the contrast with men, who on announcing a partner’s pregnancy simply receive congratulations and a nudge to work harder.

“To get here, I needed to prove myself three times more than many of my male colleagues,” Mihai said. “I killed myself with work. I really did nothing else but work and be a mom, work and be a mom.”

From the time Mihai became a mother, her own mother traveled with her to shoots and looked after the children, leaving the director free of worry. “Unfortunately, sometimes life throws very heavy things at you, and my mother passed away in a tragic car accident, so that help fell,” Mihai said.

Sode lives in Kanazawa with her husband, who travels to Tokyo often for work, while she moves to the capital alone for around six months at a time when shooting, away from her children. She compared the arrangement to a married couple running the course on “Sasuke,” the Japanese obstacle-course TV competition. Sode was unable to get her first child into daycare, a setback that brought her career to a complete stop and was one reason the family left Tokyo.

“When I could put my child in daycare and throw myself into film work, it truly felt like I’d been let out of prison,” Sode said. “There’s probably something very self-centered in me, but meeting all kinds of people through this work is what makes me feel alive.”

Mihai rejected the idea that wanting more was selfish, saying she is more than a daughter, a mother or a filmmaker, and that she encourages her children to rebel and think differently from her. Her daughter, now almost 9, visits the set on hand-picked days and has appointed herself an unofficial assistant, getting to know the cast and crew.

Sode’s children have never come to her sets. “Japanese film sets are really grueling, including in terms of hours. You have to keep shooting fast in a short amount of time, and the budget is a big part of that,” she said. Even if a director brought a child, nobody would object outright, she added, but the mood would not be welcoming, since a child would mean hiring staff for safety and finding time in the schedule. Sode pointed to the units of Nishikawa Miwa and Kore-eda Hirokazu, which have held “family days” inviting crew members’ partners and children to visit the set.

Mihai said the pressures are much the same in Europe. She shot “Heysel 85,” which features large crowd scenes, in 25 days. “It was crushing,” she said. She coped by locking down her approach early and relying on long takes, though she gave up some shooting days by choosing to film on 16mm for the look she wanted.

Her debut feature “La Civil” took seven years to make. Mihai kept putting off motherhood until the film was finished, then the pandemic brought more delays, and she ended up becoming a mother during the project. “I put myself at risk in some way while making it, and I think that I would not have had the guts or the will to do that if I knew that other people are dependent on me in such a way,” she said.

Mihai also praised the Tokyo festival for working with a nanny service during the promotional stage. “You can go to your job, come back, and be a mom again,” she said.

Kondo said guests routinely arrive at festivals alone, with little room to negotiate bringing anyone along. “From my own experience, whenever I take on a job, I make it a must that whatever I’m in charge of is at minimum child-friendly, and when possible has childcare,” she said. Sode said that for visiting guests with young children, the absence of childcare can be reason enough to turn down an invitation, and Kondo said she had heard of real cases of guests skipping film festivals for that reason.

Mihai said she had often felt judged more harshly by women raised with an older mindset than by men, and called men her greatest mentors. “It’s really not a question of men, women. It’s a question of us as society and how do we function and how we were brought up,” she said.

Asked by an audience member why film budgets stay tight even as ticket prices climb, Mihai said arthouse theaters in Europe struggle to survive and many are closing, while her community lives in constant fear of funding being redirected. “Without state funding, we would not be making these films. It’s that simple,” she said.

Sode said the question touched on too many exhibition and industry issues to answer in a few minutes, and that trusting the audience is among the hardest parts of making a film. “If, by market logic, the films shown in so-called mini theaters get weeded out, leaving only the films that play on the big screens at Toho Cinemas where you can sit comfortably, I’m sure that 10 years from now the quality of the films playing there will have dropped too,” she said. “A director who makes big films isn’t able to make them from the moment they’re born.”

Kondo closed the session by urging audiences to complain if tickets are too expensive, arguing that nothing changes unless people speak up and that it is the job of a film festival to set that cycle in motion.