Sono received the following awards for his films:
Sono also received the following nominations for his films:
After receiving a fellowship with the PIA, Sono made his first feature-length 16 mm film in 1990, Bicycle Sighs (Jitensha Toiki), a coming-of-age tale about two underachievers in perfectionist Japan. Sono co-wrote, directed, and starred in the film.
In 1992, Sono's second feature film The Room (Heya), also written by himself, was a bizarre tale about a serial killer looking for a room in a bleak, doomed Tokyo district. It participated at the Tokyo Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize. The Room also toured on 49 festivals worldwide, including the Berlin Film Festival and the Rotterdam Film Festival.
At the end of 2005, Sion Sono also premiered a personal project with actors Issei Ishida and Masumi Miyazaki. Strange Circus (Kimyô na Sâkasu), directed, written, composed and cinematographed by Sono, took elements from the Grand Guignol theater and a story from the minds of both Masumi and Sono, filled with Incest, sexual abuse, terrible family issues, extreme gore, and a twisted sense of reality.
In 2008, he was the Director and Writer of Love Exposure. Love Exposure is the first film in Sono's "Hate" trilogy; the films Cold Fish, released in 2010, and Guilty of Romance, released in 2011, are the second and third installments of the trilogy respectively. 2011 saw Sono be recognized in the United States with his work being highlighted in the cinema series Sion Sono: The New Poet presented at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
In 2013 he directed the action-drama Why Don't You Play in Hell? (Jigoku de naze warui). Following shortly after, he directed an adaptation of popular manga series Tokyo Tribe.
His next project, which begins filming in March 2015, looks to be a documentary on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, produced with avant-garde group Chimpom.
In The Hollywood Reporter, Clarence Tsui writes that Sono has "established himself as one of the most idiosyncratic artists of his generation". Often considered a provocateur, Mike Hale of The New York Times argues that he is "the most recognizable, if not the most universally celebrated, Director in Japan", which Sono himself explains by stating (in Hale's words) that Japanese critics generally "reserve their approval for work that doesn’t 'embarrass' the nation." The Director has said, "I do think an international audience understands my work more.”
