Drive My Car: When and where to watch Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-nominated film

If you are in Bengaluru next week, you can catch the Oscar-nominated film Drive My Car at the ongoing Bengaluru International Film Festival. And if you are not, well, shortly after the 94th Academy Awards on March 28, you will be able to stream it directly at home. By then, for all you know, it may also go from Oscar-nominated to Oscar winner, given that it is in the running for the honour for Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Foreign Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture.

The 2021 Japanese drama, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is primarily based on Haruki Murakami's short story of the same name from his collection Men Without Women, and takes inspiration from other stories in it. The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) as he directs a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima and grapples with the death of his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishma). Premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it won three awards, Drive My Car has an enviable list of nominations and wins at film festivals and award ceremonies, including a Golden Globe win for Best Motion Picture – Non English Language, among many others.

Drive My Car, which has a runtime of 179 minutes, is now all set to be available in India, with Mubi being its chosen streaming platform. Also starring, Tōko Miura, Masaki Okada, Park Yu-rim, Jin Dae-yeon, among others, the film will be available from April 1, 2022 onward.