2018 KYOTO INTERNATIONAL FILM AND ART FESTIVAL
Commemorating the Birthplace of Japanese Film
Venue(s): AEON CINEMA Kyoto Katsuragawa, TOHO Cinemas Nijo and Risse Cinema ProjectOctober 11 to 14, 2018
Language: Some Japanese films have English subtitles
Official website: kiff.kyoto.jp/en/
Theater website: Check the official website.
Tariff: http://kiff.kyoto.jp/ticket/
Talk event: Details: http://kiff.kyoto.jp/en/
Title: 京都国際映画祭2018 (Kyoto Kokusai Eigasai 2018)
If you know Kyoto only as Japan’s ancient capitol, the 5th annual Kyoto International Film and Art Festival (KIFF) will set you straight. This year’s edition stresses the city’s historical role as the birthplace of Japanese film, and where else can you attend an opening and award ceremonies in an Important Cultural Property?
Since the first film created there in 1908 by Shozo Makino, the “father” of Japanese film, Kyoto has remained at the heart of the nation’s jidaigeki samurai-genre production. While its studio backlots aren’t quite as busy these days, the city continues to attract dozens of major film shoots every year. The festival lineup is thus devoted to promoting silent and classical films as well as emerging local talent, international work from TV directors and documentarians and, from this year, animation.
Hosted by Yoshimoto Kogyo Company, the festival will hold screenings and related events all over town, and hand out the Shozo Makino Award (for contributions to the development of Japanese cinema) and the Toshiro Mifune Award (for an actor who is most likely to make an international impact on the film industry), although the honorees won’t be announced until the festival is held.
There will be retrospectives of the work of director Kinji Fukasaku and cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa, as well as the first new jidaigeki epic in 20 years from chambara maestro Sadao Nakajima (Tajuro Jun Aiki, starring Kengo Kora), who also serves as the honorary chairman of the festival’s executive committee.
Unfortunately, English subtitles are few and far between. Only two Japanese-language films in the main lineup are subbed. Ujicha’s Violence Voyager is the story of two boys who stumble upon a strange amusement park en route to a friend’s house, and only realize later that the proprietor is a mad scientist using children to create a race of mutants. It is the first feature-length film made using the “gekimation” animation technique, in which paper cutouts are filmed in real time moving through a scene in order to create the illusion of motion. The Kyoto-born analog artist created 3,000 original frames, while also directing, writing and shooting the film, a painstaking process that took him 3 years.
Violence Voyager (2018), Director Ujicha ©︎Yoshimoto Kogyo
Oct. 13 (Sat) 18:50- @Yoshimoto Gion Kagetsu
Regge Life’s Okinawa-set Cocktail Party, based on the Akutagawa Prizewinning novella by Tatsuhiro Oshiro, couldn’t be more timely, even if the book was written some 40 years ago. The daughter of a Japanese businessman in Okinawa claims that a US serviceman assaulted her, the serviceman claims it was consensual, and the resentments on both sides — Okinawan and American — come to the fore during the ensuing investigations.
Cocktail Party (2016), Director Regge Life © 2016 by Lifecycle Productions Inc.
Oct. 12 (Fri) 16:10- @Eon Cinema Kyoto Katsuragawa
If you know Kyoto only as Japan’s ancient capitol, the 5th annual Kyoto International Film and Art Festival (KIFF) will set you straight. This year’s edition stresses the city’s historical role as the birthplace of Japanese film, and where else can you attend an opening and award ceremonies in an Important Cultural Property?
Since the first film created there in 1908 by Shozo Makino, the “father” of Japanese film, Kyoto has remained at the heart of the nation’s jidaigeki samurai-genre production. While its studio backlots aren’t quite as busy these days, the city continues to attract dozens of major film shoots every year. The festival lineup is thus devoted to promoting silent and classical films as well as emerging local talent, international work from TV directors and documentarians and, from this year, animation.
Hosted by Yoshimoto Kogyo Company, the festival will hold screenings and related events all over town, and hand out the Shozo Makino Award (for contributions to the development of Japanese cinema) and the Toshiro Mifune Award (for an actor who is most likely to make an international impact on the film industry), although the honorees won’t be announced until the festival is held.
There will be retrospectives of the work of director Kinji Fukasaku and cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa, as well as the first new jidaigeki epic in 20 years from chambara maestro Sadao Nakajima (Tajuro Jun Aiki, starring Kengo Kora), who also serves as the honorary chairman of the festival’s executive committee.
Unfortunately, English subtitles are few and far between. Only two Japanese-language films in the main lineup are subbed. Ujicha’s Violence Voyager is the story of two boys who stumble upon a strange amusement park en route to a friend’s house, and only realize later that the proprietor is a mad scientist using children to create a race of mutants. It is the first feature-length film made using the “gekimation” animation technique, in which paper cutouts are filmed in real time moving through a scene in order to create the illusion of motion. The Kyoto-born analog artist created 3,000 original frames, while also directing, writing and shooting the film, a painstaking process that took him 3 years.
Violence Voyager (2018), Director Ujicha ©︎Yoshimoto Kogyo
Oct. 13 (Sat) 18:50- @Yoshimoto Gion Kagetsu
Regge Life’s Okinawa-set Cocktail Party, based on the Akutagawa Prizewinning novella by Tatsuhiro Oshiro, couldn’t be more timely, even if the book was written some 40 years ago. The daughter of a Japanese businessman in Okinawa claims that a US serviceman assaulted her, the serviceman claims it was consensual, and the resentments on both sides — Okinawan and American — come to the fore during the ensuing investigations.
Cocktail Party (2016), Director Regge Life © 2016 by Lifecycle Productions Inc.
Oct. 12 (Fri) 16:10- @Eon Cinema Kyoto Katsuragawa
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.