Kiyoshi Kurosawa started making 8mm films while still in high school and continued his studies at the university under the tutelage of Shigehiko Hasumi. In 1980 he won a prize at the PIA Film Festival with his medium-length film Vertigo College and after working as assistant director, made his feature film in 1983 at Nikkatsu, a major Japanese studio, with Kandagawa Lewdness Wars. Japanese moviegoers began to notice him after he made independent films such as Excitement of the DoReMiFa Girl and The Guard From The Underground. In 1992, he participated in the Residential Program of the Sundance Institute, where he wrote the script for Charisma, which he would direct seven years later.

In 1997, the serial-killer thriller Cure introduced Kurosawa to audiences around the world through the International Film Circuit Festival. License To Live, his first non-genre film was released in 1998 and Barren Illusion and Charisma, a philosophical tale and an absurd farce, respectively, appeared in 1999. In 2001 Pulse solidified Kurosawa´s place alongside contemporary masters of the thriller with their supernatural sense of rhythm and pictorial composition. His films Bright Future was selected to compete at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003. He eventually returned to ghost stories with Séance in 2004, followed by the movie Loft Mummies in 2006, the year in which Pulse was remade by The Weinstein Company, with a new screenplay by Wes Craven.

Retribution marked the seventh collaboration between Kurosawa and his favorite actor, Koji Yaksho (Babel), with whom the director worked on Tokyo Sonata, a film that earned him the Un Certain Regard jury prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
In 2011, Kurosawa directed Penance, a 5-episode miniseries for Japanese television that aired in 2012, and was released for theaters in 2013. In 2012, he directed Real, a high-budget science fiction film produced by the TV channel Japanese television TBS by the great Japanese studio Toho, which was released in March 2014. Its next film, Seventh Code, was filmed entirely in Vladivostok, Siberia, with Japanese star Atsuko Maeda, and won two prizes at Rome Film Festival in 2013, including the Best Director award.
Journey To The Shore won the Best Director award at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and in 2016, Creepy was selected at the Berlin Film Festival. That same year, Daguerrotype, its first French film with Tahar Rahim, Constance Rousseau and Olivier Gourmet, was selected to compete in the platform of the Film Festival of Toronto.

Jean (Tahar Rahim), is a young Parisian with few skills and seems an unlikely candidate to be assistant to renowned photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet), an obsessive perfectionist who has lived in isolation since his wife’s unexpected death. Even so, he arrives in the sprawling, dilapidated mansion of his new employer, and helps him create daguerreotypes of real size, so vivid they seem to contain a portion of the soul of his subjects. Her model is constantly the daughter and muse of Stéphane, Marie (Constance Rousseau), and while she and Jean fall in love, they realize that they must create a plan to leave the mansion forever. But will there be something malevolent within the great daguerreotypes that will prevent their escape? From acclaimed Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse), comes Daguerrotype, a classic ghost story tilted through the lens of one of the most unique visionaries of horror working today.