39th PIA FILM FESTIVAL
Pia Film Fest Unveils Discoveries and Revisits Standouts
Venue(s): National Film CenterSeptember 16 to September 29, 2017
Official website: pff.jp/39th/
Theater website: www.momat.go.jp/english/fc/
Tariff: Most screenings: General:￥1,500 / Collleage students: ￥1,100 / H.S. Students: ￥520 / Seniors: ￥1,100 / PIA members: ￥1,200
Advance tickets: Most screenings: ¥1,000: Pia P-Code: 557-416. Details: https://pff.jp/39th/tickets.html
Talk event: Talk event after each screening
Title: 第39回 PFF (Dai 39 Kai PFF)
That naughty, pigtailed schoolgirl doesn’t look a day over 14, but she’s baaaaack for the 39th edition of the Pia Film Festival (PFF), running from Sept. 16 – Sept. 29 at the National Film Center in Kyobashi.
The festival is legendary for its discovery and nurturing of many of Japan’s now-famed directors (including Sion Sono, Gakuryu Ishii, Shinya Tsukamoto, Shinobu Yaguchi and Yuya Ishii), so if you want to know who’s going to be the Next Big Thing, here’s your chance to witness his or her emergence (and to vote on the all-important Audience Award).
Because its selection of competition films is so extensive and up-to-the-minute, PFF is not able to screen them with English subs; but the festival always offers a handful of special programs that are subtitled, and this year is no different.
The English-subbed highlight of PFF 39 is the world premiere of One Piece! International Classics. If you immediately had visions of the enduringly popular manga/anime franchise, banish them from your mind. This one is a celebration of the one scene/one cut project launched in 1994 by writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi (Waterboys, Survival Family) and Takuji Suzuki, primarily known as an actor.
Takuji Suzuki x Shinobu Yaguchi
(鈴木卓爾×矢口史靖)
Predating the tenants of the Dogma 95 creators, the two set themselves the following rules: The short film must be created without any camera movement or editing, and the story must be told on "one piece" of celluloid. Together, Yaguchi and Suzuki created 63 pieces over the years, and in February 2017, Pony Canyon released a 20th-anniversary DVD box set (1994-2014). For PFF, the directors have selected 13 of the pieces for international audiences and given them English subtitles. (PFF is also screening a package called One Piece Challenge!, which is not subtitled in English, but includes the work of indie stalwarts like Koji Fukada, Koki Yoshida, Rikiya Imaizumi and Sho Miyake).
One piece of One Piece
dir.: Shinobu Yaguchi and Takuji Suzuki
(ワンピース, Japanese with English subtitles, 80 min, 1994 - 2014)
Another English-subbed highlight in this year’s festival is the new film from Ryutaro Ninomiya, hot off its Locarno Film Festival world premiere in early August. Ninomiya won a Special Mention from Pia for his first film, The Charm of Others in 2012, and this sophomore work is sure to expand his following. Sweating the Small Stuff is “based on a true story” (although “inspired by reality” would be more apt), with the director playing the lead and his family and friends playing the other characters. Although it initially distances viewers with its extensive use of shaky cam and its impenetrable protagonist, it is guaranteed to grow on you. If you have a soft spot, it’s even guaranteed to move you.
SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF
dir.: Ryutaro Ninomiya
(枝葉のこと, Japanese with English subtitles, 114 min, 2017)
Ryutaro is a lonely, aimless mechanic in Yokohama who would seem to have been destined for a higher purpose. He once won a prize for his writing and spends much of his downtime with books; but his colleagues invite him drinking just so he’ll pick up the tab, his waitress hookup tells him he looks like Doraemon (not without a grain of truth), and he’s forever getting punched out. When his childhood friend Yusuke calls out of the blue, Ryutaro is plunged into a past that was clearly happier. As we watch him open up (a crack) with Yusuke’s mom, Ryuko, who is dying from Hepatitis C, we get glimmers of the man he might have been, and we ache with him.
The older characters in Sweating the Small Stuff all seem to be ill or close to death, and as the Locarno curator notes, “this societal sickness is leaking its way down to the youth, who spend their free time poisoning their own bodies, having long since abandoned their dreams.”
Among the English-subbed offerings that are not Japanese is Philippine director Lav Diaz’s 338-minute From What Is Before, winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival. Diaz is known for shooting in luminous black and white, and for the epic length (and texture) of his works. A far more sprawling work than his 2016 Venice Golden Lion winner, The Woman Who Left, which is showing at PFF 29 without English subs, From What Is Before focuses on a remote town in the 1970s, as Ferdinand E. Marcos issues Proclamation No. 1081, putting the entire country under Martial Law, and soldiers descend upon the town.
The Woman Who Left
dir.: Lav Diaz
(昔のはじまり, Filipino with Japanese and English subtitles, 338 min, 2014)
As always, there are several don’t-miss Japanese selections playing without English subs, including this year’s Opening Film, Wilderness, the long-awaited adaptation of Shuji Terayama’s 1966 novel Aa, Koya. It stars the always interesting Masaki Suda as a young delinquent who meets an introverted Korean man (Yang Ik-June) in a boxing gym and gradually becomes friends with him.
Wilderness: Parts One and Two
dir.: Yoshiyuki Kishi
(あゝ、荒野, Japanese with no subtitles, 157 min and 147 min, 2017)
As for the PFF competition films, keep your eyes open for opportunities to see the English-subbed versions both in Japan and elsewhere, soon after the 39th edition wraps. Festival director Keiko Araki and her staff immediately set to work sending out English-subbed screeners to all the leading indie film festivals, as well as laying plans to screen standouts outside of Tokyo.
National Film Center
That naughty, pigtailed schoolgirl doesn’t look a day over 14, but she’s baaaaack for the 39th edition of the Pia Film Festival (PFF), running from Sept. 16 – Sept. 29 at the National Film Center in Kyobashi.
The festival is legendary for its discovery and nurturing of many of Japan’s now-famed directors (including Sion Sono, Gakuryu Ishii, Shinya Tsukamoto, Shinobu Yaguchi and Yuya Ishii), so if you want to know who’s going to be the Next Big Thing, here’s your chance to witness his or her emergence (and to vote on the all-important Audience Award).
Because its selection of competition films is so extensive and up-to-the-minute, PFF is not able to screen them with English subs; but the festival always offers a handful of special programs that are subtitled, and this year is no different.
The English-subbed highlight of PFF 39 is the world premiere of One Piece! International Classics. If you immediately had visions of the enduringly popular manga/anime franchise, banish them from your mind. This one is a celebration of the one scene/one cut project launched in 1994 by writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi (Waterboys, Survival Family) and Takuji Suzuki, primarily known as an actor.
Takuji Suzuki x Shinobu Yaguchi
(鈴木卓爾×矢口史靖)
Predating the tenants of the Dogma 95 creators, the two set themselves the following rules: The short film must be created without any camera movement or editing, and the story must be told on "one piece" of celluloid. Together, Yaguchi and Suzuki created 63 pieces over the years, and in February 2017, Pony Canyon released a 20th-anniversary DVD box set (1994-2014). For PFF, the directors have selected 13 of the pieces for international audiences and given them English subtitles. (PFF is also screening a package called One Piece Challenge!, which is not subtitled in English, but includes the work of indie stalwarts like Koji Fukada, Koki Yoshida, Rikiya Imaizumi and Sho Miyake).
One piece of One Piece
dir.: Shinobu Yaguchi and Takuji Suzuki
(ワンピース, Japanese with English subtitles, 80 min, 1994 - 2014)
Another English-subbed highlight in this year’s festival is the new film from Ryutaro Ninomiya, hot off its Locarno Film Festival world premiere in early August. Ninomiya won a Special Mention from Pia for his first film, The Charm of Others in 2012, and this sophomore work is sure to expand his following. Sweating the Small Stuff is “based on a true story” (although “inspired by reality” would be more apt), with the director playing the lead and his family and friends playing the other characters. Although it initially distances viewers with its extensive use of shaky cam and its impenetrable protagonist, it is guaranteed to grow on you. If you have a soft spot, it’s even guaranteed to move you.
SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF
dir.: Ryutaro Ninomiya
(枝葉のこと, Japanese with English subtitles, 114 min, 2017)
Ryutaro is a lonely, aimless mechanic in Yokohama who would seem to have been destined for a higher purpose. He once won a prize for his writing and spends much of his downtime with books; but his colleagues invite him drinking just so he’ll pick up the tab, his waitress hookup tells him he looks like Doraemon (not without a grain of truth), and he’s forever getting punched out. When his childhood friend Yusuke calls out of the blue, Ryutaro is plunged into a past that was clearly happier. As we watch him open up (a crack) with Yusuke’s mom, Ryuko, who is dying from Hepatitis C, we get glimmers of the man he might have been, and we ache with him.
The older characters in Sweating the Small Stuff all seem to be ill or close to death, and as the Locarno curator notes, “this societal sickness is leaking its way down to the youth, who spend their free time poisoning their own bodies, having long since abandoned their dreams.”
Among the English-subbed offerings that are not Japanese is Philippine director Lav Diaz’s 338-minute From What Is Before, winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival. Diaz is known for shooting in luminous black and white, and for the epic length (and texture) of his works. A far more sprawling work than his 2016 Venice Golden Lion winner, The Woman Who Left, which is showing at PFF 29 without English subs, From What Is Before focuses on a remote town in the 1970s, as Ferdinand E. Marcos issues Proclamation No. 1081, putting the entire country under Martial Law, and soldiers descend upon the town.
The Woman Who Left
dir.: Lav Diaz
(昔のはじまり, Filipino with Japanese and English subtitles, 338 min, 2014)
As always, there are several don’t-miss Japanese selections playing without English subs, including this year’s Opening Film, Wilderness, the long-awaited adaptation of Shuji Terayama’s 1966 novel Aa, Koya. It stars the always interesting Masaki Suda as a young delinquent who meets an introverted Korean man (Yang Ik-June) in a boxing gym and gradually becomes friends with him.
Wilderness: Parts One and Two
dir.: Yoshiyuki Kishi
(あゝ、荒野, Japanese with no subtitles, 157 min and 147 min, 2017)
As for the PFF competition films, keep your eyes open for opportunities to see the English-subbed versions both in Japan and elsewhere, soon after the 39th edition wraps. Festival director Keiko Araki and her staff immediately set to work sending out English-subbed screeners to all the leading indie film festivals, as well as laying plans to screen standouts outside of Tokyo.
National Film Center
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.