Yū Irie

Yū Irie is the kind of filmmaker I genuinely respect — a writer-director who insists on controlling the whole story from page to screen, which in the Japanese film industry takes a certain quiet stubbornness. Born in Yokohama in 1979, he came up through Nihon University's arts program and earned the Japan Directors Guild New Directors Award in 2010, which is a real credential, not a consolation prize. What I find compelling is that he doesn't chase the prestige-drama lane or the crowd-pleasing blockbuster lane — he seems to carve out his own lane and just stay in it. He's not the loudest name at the festival table, but the quiet ones who keep making films on their own terms tend to outlast everyone else, and I'd bet on him doing exactly that.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Yū Irie is a Japanese film director and screenwriter born on November 25, 1979, in Yokohama, Kanagawa. He studied at Nihon University and went on to establish himself in independent Japanese cinema as a writer-director. In 2010, he received the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award, recognizing his early work behind the camera. He is known for writing and directing his own projects across a range of genres.

Name (English)

Yū Irie

Name (Japanese)

入江悠

Reading

いりえ ゆう

Born

November 25, 1979 (age 46)

Origin

Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

Occupation

Film director / Screenwriter

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Goat

University

Nihon University

Awards & achievements

• 2010 — Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award

• Xhttps://x.com/uirie
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%A5%E6%B1%9F%E6%82%A0
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5359295

Tags

• From Kanagawa
• Film director
• Screenwriter

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.