It’s an exciting time for Japanese cinema, with franchise hits from Demon Slayer to Godzilla stomping around the world, and Japanese arthouse titles taking the spotlight at major film festivals including Venice, Toronto and Cannes.
This year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, taking place in the Hibiya-Ginza district of the city from October 26 to November 4, aims to take full advantage of the momentum and help expand the international profile of Japanese films. Under incoming Festival Director Takeo Hisamatsu, and Programming Director Shozo Ichiyama, the festival is also positioning itself as a launchpad for international films in Japan.
Hisamatsu, who previously held senior posts at Warner Bros Japan and local studio Shochiku, headed the festival from 2017-2021 and returned earlier this year when Hiroyasu Ando stepped down after seven years at the helm. While Ichiyama has been strengthening the festival’s competitions, Gala and World Focus line-ups, Hisamatsu says he wants to bolster the glamour quotient at the festival, especially as it gears up for its 40th edition next year.
“We want to combine art and entertainment and make the festival as multifaceted as possible,” says Hisamatsu, sitting down with Deadline at the festival’s office in the historic Togeki Building in Ginza. “This should be a festival for cinephiles, for general film fans, and also for people who maybe only visit a cinema once or twice in a year. Everyone should be able to find something they want to see.”
While describing this year’s pre-anniversary edition as a time for evaluation, he envisages a line-up that includes Japanese films, Hollywood and other international titles, awards contenders, and every genre and format from live action and animation to documentary and short films. The U.S. studios have not been promoting heavily at Asian film festivals in recent years, but Hisamatsu hopes to lure them back: “Japan is still a big market – last year our box office hit a record and surpassed pre-pandemic revenues. Now is a good time to reboot the popularity of Hollywood films in Japan.”
Hisamatsu is also engaging with international organisations, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which is bringing a delegation of executives, including Academy CEO Bill Kramer, to participate in a busy schedule of panels and networking events at the festival. Several awards season contenders, including Wild Horse Nine, La Bola Negra, animated feature Wildwood, and Christian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fjord, are screening across the festival’s Gala, World Focus and Special Screenings sections.
However, the festival toppers stress that this doesn’t mean any attention will be taken away from Japanese titles. “One of our major goals is to introduce Japanese films to international markets,” says Hisamatsu. The festival will open with a Japanese film – Zeze Takahisa’s Sukiyaki, about the historic song that topped the Billboard charts and remains one of the world’s best-selling tunes – while Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero, the highly-anticipated sequel to Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, will play as the Centerpiece Film. Korean filmmaker Yang Sang-ho’s zombie thriller Colony will close the festival.
Three Japanese films have been selected for the festival’s main Competition section: The Canary’s Lullaby, directed by Akira Ikeda; Yukiko Mishima’s Two Cigarettes, Three Nights; and Akira Yamamoto’s The Intertwining. Ichiyama, the festival’s Programming Director, explains that The Canary’s Lullaby is a Japan-Taiwan co-production, partly filmed on Taiwan’s Kinmen Island, and The Intertwining is based on a Japanese novel but has Korean elements, demonstrating the more international outlook of Japan’s new generation of directors.
With major festivals including Cannes, Venice and Toronto, all of which take place before Tokyo, hoovering up Japanese titles over the past few years, Ichiyama says his focus has been on discoveries, as the festival requires world premieres for the Japanese films in competition. “These three filmmakers are not so well known internationally, but they’re all extremely promising, and have the potential to go to European film festivals in the future,” he says.
Other world premieres in the Competition line-up include Indonesian filmmaker Garin Nugroho’s Red Before Dawn, set in a newly independent Indonesia in the 1940s, which Ichiyama describes as “a big-budget epic drama”; Macedonian filmmaker Milcho Manchevski’s social satire Sister Brother Manhole Cover; and two Chinese-language titles Fuxi: Four Tales Of Feasting, from Qiu Jiongjiong, and Wang Jianyong’s The Night That Binds Us.
Also in the line-up of 15 competition titles is Rubaiyat Hussain’s The Difficult Bride, which world premiered in the Horizons section of this year’s Venice film festival and marks the first ever Bangladeshi film selected for Tokyo main competition. “We saw it in Venice and sent the the invitation very quickly,” says Ichiyama. “We usually see two or three interesting films from Bangladesh in one year, and this one is outstanding.”
Rounding out the competition are Heysel 85, from Romanian filmmaker Teodora Ana Mihai, joining Tokyo Competition for the third time following Traffic and La Civil; Until The Day Ends, from Serbian filmmaker Jelena Maksimović; Double Freedom, from Argentina’s Lisandro Alonso; Even If Hell Came, from Italy’s Samuele Rossi; Portuguese filmmaker Sérgio Graciano’s Memories Of Prison; Singaporean animation Magic Atlas from Sun Xun, and Trees Are Watching from Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi.
Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer is heading the main competition jury, which also includes Tokyo and New York-based producer Alex Lo, Korean producer Oh Jungwan, French colorist Yov Moor and Japanese actress Makiko Watanabe. An Australia Spotlight will screen De Heer’s 2022 The Survival Of Kindness; Natalie Erika James’ body horror Saccharine, and Vee Shi’s hybrid documentary Time And Tide.
Other talent attending the festival include Cate Blanchett, in town to celebrate the Japan premieres of five short films supported by the Displacement Film Fund (and who is also a producer on Alpha Gang, recently added to Special Screenings); as well as Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof and Japanese filmmaker Mipo O, both recipients of this year’s Kurosawa Akira Award. Filmmakers including Ilya Khrzhanovsky (DAU), Teodora Ana Mihai (Heysel 85), Zeze Takahisa (Sukiyaki), Shahrbanoo Sadat (No Good Men) and Yukiko Sode (All The Lovers In The Night) will deliver talk sessions and masterclasses.
Tokyo has two other competition sections – Asian Future, focused on emerging Asian directors, and Nippon Cinema Now, which aims to present an overview of the current state of contemporary Japanese film. Nippon Cinema Now will screen eight titles, from both new and established directors, and has introduced two new awards for Best Film and a Special Jury Prize.
Asian Future, programmed by Kenji Ishizaka, will screen 10 world premieres from Japan, Korea, Philippines, India, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and Iran. This year also sees the return of the festival’s non-competitive section dedicated to Southeast Asian cinema, Crosscut Asia, held in partnership with the Japan Foundation, which stopped running during the pandemic period. Now titled Crosscut Asia+, the section will screen three recent festival hits, Four Seasons In Java, Filipiñana and Becoming Human, along with a selection of retrospective titles.
Other major sections include Animation, which will screen Cannes Un Certain Regard special jury prize winner Iron Boy, among other titles; Women’s Empowerment, including recent festival breakouts Lovers In The Blue Night, from India’s Anupama Roy, and A Girl Unknown, from China’s Zou Jing; Japanese Classics, including a Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective; and the Youth and Asian Students Film Conference sections.
Taking place towards the end of the year, Tokyo Film Festival has always been in a good position to present a “best of fests” round-up for local audiences, and this year aims to double down on efforts to connect international films with Japanese buyers, both directly at the festival and through the TIFFCOM contents market taking place a few metro stops away.
“Especially in World Focus, we’re showing many films that played in Berlin, Venice and Cannes, several of which have still not found a Japanese distributor,” Ichiyama says. “Japan has many strong, independent buyers, but with the current weakness of the Japanese yen, they’ve not been so eager to travel to Venice and Toronto or acquire new films. We can present those titles here in theatres with local audiences and Japanese subtitles.”
With many screenings already sold out, filmmakers and industry can expect packed houses and attentive audiences for these films. As Hisamatsu observes, Japan continues to be one of the world’s top theatrical markets, and while anime and Godzilla may be pulling the biggest crowds, Tokyo Film Festival is one time of year at least when movies of all genres, languages and budget levels will be reaching audiences on a big screen.
The festival kicks off on Monday, October 26, with an opening ceremony and screening of Sukiyaki, and runs until Wednesday, November 4, while TIFFCOM is taking place October 28-30 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center in Hamamatsucho.