Biography
For nearly two decades, Shin Yamaguchi has worked at the intersection of artistic ambition and global cinema - producing films that don't merely cross borders, but dissolve them. As founder of the Tokyo-based production company KNOCKONWOOD, he has built a career on films that carry weight: works of emotional precision and formal audacity, crafted through international co-productions and financing structures that meet the highest standards of world cinema.
His career began in the most exhilarating possible way: as Line Producer on Gaspar Noé's hallucinatory Enter the Void, the film that would introduce him to cinema's most uncompromising outer edges - and sharpen the craft that would define everything to follow. From there, he has never retreated toward safety. Whether navigating the delicate poetics of Eric Khoo's Ramen The, or anchoring the ethereal gravitas of Spirit World - starring Catherine Deneuve - Yamaguchi has demonstrated a consistent ability to attract luminous talent and hold the creative conditions in which great work can emerge.
His most enduring creative partnership may be with director HIKARI, whose artistic vision he has championed and supported since 2011 - long before the wider world caught up. From the short films A Better Tomorrow and Where We Begin, through to her acclaimed debut feature 37 Seconds, winner of both the Panorama Audience Award and the CICAE Art Cinema Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, Yamaguchi has served as a steadfast creative partner across more than a decade of filmmaking. Their most recent collaboration, Rental Family, starring Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser, was released by Searchlight Pictures across 73 countries worldwide, including the United States and Japan.
He has also long admired the work of Koji Fukada, one of Japan's most celebrated auteurs and a perennial presence at the Cannes Film Festival - and their first collaboration, Love on Trial, was selected for its World Premiere at Cannes 2025, a debut partnership that arrived on the world's most prestigious stage.
His reach extends well beyond Japan and Europe. Yamaguchi has forged a creative alliance with Eddie Cahyono, one of Indonesia's most rare and distinctive art film voices - a director who has spent years quietly producing work of uncommon depth and humanity, channeling Indonesian experience into a cinematic language that resonates globally. Their new film, My Mother, is currently in post-production, and stands as a testament to Yamaguchi's belief that great cinema has no single geography.
Simultaneously, he has entered pre-production on a new feature with director Eiji Uchida, adapting the beloved literary journey Midnight Express by Kotaro Sawaki - a book that has sold over six million copies and left an indelible mark on generations of Japanese readers. The project marks a significant step into major literary adaptation, and signals
Yamaguchi's ambition to bring defining Japanese narratives to the world stage. What unifies Yamaguchi's filmography is not genre or geography, but an unwavering commitment to enduring cinematic experiences: films made with care, released into the world with intention, and designed to last. In an era of content, he makes cinema.
