Noémie Nakai (中井 ノエミ, Nakai Noemi, born December 2, 1990), is a French-Japanese actress, director and former model.[1]
Early life
Noémie Nakai was born on December 2, 1990, in Tokyo, Japan. She has a French mother and a Japanese father.[2] She took acting lessons when she was very young in France, and arrived by chance in modeling by shooting for advertisements in order to follow her friends. In 2013, she got her first real acting role in the drama Shûden Bye Bye.[3] Nakai is a graduate of the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France and Keio University in Japan. She also studied at the University of Nottingham in England.
Career
On the eve of her thirties, she won the Busan Award in October 2019 as a director in the Asian Project Market section (co-production platform allowing emerging directors to meet market professionals on an international level) of the Busan International Film Festival for the Topography of Solitude project.[4]
Her short film Tears Teacher spotted at the Hot Docs Festival was acquired by the Op Docs section of The New York Times.[5][6] This ten-minute documentary is dedicated to Hidefumi Yoshida, a teacher who has been a tear therapy practitioner since 2015, who organizes meetings where men and women cry bitterly and anonymously write down painful episodes of their lives. “Emotional outbursts” are frowned upon in Japan.[5]Tears Teacher was selected in the short documentary category of the 2021 Sundance Festival available for streaming on the New York Times website.[7]