SHŌGUN makes history winning 18 Emmy Awards

The phrase “timing is everything” couldn’t relate better to the festival’s evening with SHŌGUN’s showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, who are this year’s HIFF44 Career Achievement Award honorees.  Make sure to book your tickets for SHŌGUN – AN EVENING WITH SHOWRUNNERS JUSTIN MARKS & RACHEL KONDO, scheduled for October 11th at Consolidated Kahala. It is fortuitous timing for HIFF to celebrate this groundbreaking series and its showrunners, especially coming on the heels of its racking up a record 18 Emmy awards, including four that were part of Sunday’s gala event.

Marks and Kondo–who are married with two children–are residents of Maui, and Kondo was born on the Valley Isle, raised in Pukalani and attended Maui High School. She is also a nationally recognized fiction writer, while husband Marks Is a veteran television and film writer with credits that include an Oscar nomination for co-writing TOP GUN: MAVERICK.

The two of them have hit it out of the park with their re-adaptation of the James Clavell novel, bringing into sharp focus the Japanese characters that perhaps were “exoticized” in the original television series back in 1980. That sensitivity to culture and historical detail, helped in large part with the support of a Japanese production crew, had audiences and critics alike raving about the 10-episode series (with two more seasons already planned).

On Sunday, SHŌGUN won Emmys for outstanding drama series, Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai for lead actor and actress, and director Frederick E.O. Toye, who helmed four of its episodes.

The Hollywood Reporter points out that the award recognition is “a major moment for Asian representation and non-English-language television. SHŌGUN is the very first majority non-English-language series to win in the outstanding drama series category (Netflix’s Korean sensation SQUID GAME was nominated in 2022 but lost to HBO’s SUCCESSION), and Sanada and Sawai are the first Japanese actors ever to win Emmys.”

Previous to Sunday’s gala ceremony, SHŌGUN already had made history with 14 Creative Arts Emmy wins the previous weekend, the most by a show in a single season. It practically swept all technical categories, with episode-specific wins for outstanding cinematography, visual and sound editing, and period costumes, hairstyling and makeup.

It also won overall Creative Arts Emmys for main title design, outstanding casting for a drama series, and outstanding short form nonfiction or reality series for THE MAKING OF SHŌGUN.

To circle back to our festival’s event with Marks and Kondo, the very first episode of SHŌGUN, “Anjin” will be shown on the big screen in all its splendor that will precede their remarks. “Anjin” won Creative Emmys for outstanding production design and an outstanding guest actor award for Nestor Carbonell. (Carbonell, coincidentally enough, was a guest actor during the third season of LOST, shot in Hawai‘i, whose own documentary GETTING LOST is part of the HIFF slate of films this year.)