FOCUS ON ASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FUKUOKA 2017
World Premieres and a Tribute to a Legendary Director
Venue(s): CANAL CITY HAKATASeptember 15 (Fri) to September 24 (Sun), 2017
Language: All films will be with (Japanese and) English subtitles.
Theater website: https://canalcity.co.jp/english
Tariff: Single ticket: ¥1,300, 5 ticket pack: ¥5,500, Pass: ¥13,000, Students: ¥500 (day tickets only)
Advance tickets: Single ticket: ¥1,100, 5 ticket pack: ¥4,400, Pass: ¥11,000, Students: NA (day tickets only)
Talk event: Talk event after each screening
Title: アジアフォーカス・福岡国際映画祭 2017 (Asian Focus Fukuoka Kokusai Eigasai 2017)
For those who are living in or visiting Fukuoka between Sept. 15 and 25 — and for those diehard cinema lovers who have been looking for a reason to visit — Tokyo Filmgoer has 5 pairs of tickets for the Focus on Asia Fukuoka International Film Festival to give away.
Submission is closed! Thank you for your entry.
Click on the following link,
You can join Tokyo Filmgoer email news
Japan’s southern gateway to Asia, FIFF has been introducing quality Asian films for 26 years, screening 15 – 20 new titles from the region in the main selection, along with dozens of other standout films, including classics. Last year, the festival featured 55 films from 23 countries/regions in the main lineup, and a total of 312 titles from 27 countries/regions when combined with collaborative screenings. Nearly 80 guests were on hand to talk with the 38,000+ attendees (an impressive number for a city whose population is only 1.5 million).
Like most festivals, Fukuoka screens nearly all titles with English subs, so you have a smorgasbord of buzzed-about Asian films to look forward to, including one of our favorite films of last year, the electrically charged black comedy Godspeed (Chung Mong-Hong, Taiwan), the award-winning teens-pervert-standardized-testing tale Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya, Thailand) and the Cannes-premiering Diamond Island, about construction workers in Phnom Penh, by French-Cambodian Davy Chou. There are also screenings of Thailand’s official Oscar candidate for 2017, the extraordinary By the Time It Gets Dark, by Anocha Suwichakornpong, and a special selection of documentaries.
Also among the Asian titles on view is the omnibus Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections, the first coproduction between The Japan Foundation Asia Center and Tokyo International Film Festival. It features short films by the Philippines’ Brillante Ma Mendoza and Cambodia’s Sotho Kulikar, as well as Pigeon, by Japan’s Isao Yukisada. Pigeon stars veteran actor Masahiko Tsugawa as Michisaburo, a lonely widower living in Penang, Malaysia, who raises pigeons. When a new helper arrives to look after him, she triggers memories that Michisaburo had long suppressed. Eventually, a bond starts to form between the two, and the old man lets go of his bitterness.
Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections
dir. :Isao Yukisada
(アジア三面鏡 2016: リフレクションズ, Japanese and English subtitles, 118 min, 2016)
There are limited Japanese films at FIFF, but Su-yeon Gu (Hard Romanticker) is world premiering his new Miko Girl, starring Alice Hirose as Shiwasu, an unconventional shrine priestess who starts looking after a 5-year-old boy, Kenta. Also in the lineup is The Foolish Bird, by the married writing-directing team of Huang Ji (China) and Ryuji Otsuka (Japan), also the cinematographer, about the heartbreaking world of China’s left-behind children, who remain in the villages while their parents go, sometimes forever, to the city to make money.
MIKO GIRL, dir.: Su-yeon Gu
(巫女っちゃけん。 Miko cha'ken, Japanese with English subtitles, 98 min, 2017)
Still think it’s too far to schlep to Shikoku? Maybe this will help change your mind: FIFF is hosting a mini-retrospective of the work of Nobuhiko Obayashi, the legendary director of House —the psychedelic 1977 cult comedy-horror film that brought him to global acclaim some 25 years later, after it was discovered by the West. House is one of three titles screening (without English subs). But the big news is that Obayashi, who has been battling cancer, will be on hand for the world premiere of his new masterwork, Hanagatami.
HANAGATAMI
dir.: Nobuhiko Obayashi
(花筐/HANAGATAMI Japanese with English subtitles, 169 min, 2017)
©唐津映画製作委員会／PSC 2017
A visual feast, as are all the maestro’s singular creations, Hanagatami (based on the novel by Naoki Prizewinner Kazuo Dan) features an intriguing cast of up-and-comers (Shunsuke Kubozuka, Shinnosuke Mitsushima, Keishi Nagatsuka, Tokio Emoto, Honoka Yagahi, Hirona Yamazaki, Mugi Kadowaki, Takako Tokiwa) in a Saga-set antiwar tale of epic proportions. In the bucolic town of the 1930s, as youth come of age and gradually get picked off by the draft, the moon is always full, blossoms bloom and fireflies flit, colors are eye-popping, poetry is on every lip, music swells on the soundtrack, ghosts always return with messages and metaphors are hard to parse.
Obayashi had wanted to film the story for 40 years, and it’s no exaggeration to view it as the culmination of his many impulses and obsessions, his magnum opus — one of the characters even references Sadao Yamanaka’s Humanity and Paper Balloons, the last film the director made before going off to Manchuria, where he died. “If war is worth fighting for,” goes one line in Hanagatami, “so is a festival.” And no one has ever put on a festival like Obayashi.
CANAL CITY HAKATA
For those who are living in or visiting Fukuoka between Sept. 15 and 25 — and for those diehard cinema lovers who have been looking for a reason to visit — Tokyo Filmgoer has 5 pairs of tickets for the Focus on Asia Fukuoka International Film Festival to give away.
Submission is closed! Thank you for your entry.
Click on the following link,
You can join Tokyo Filmgoer email news
Japan’s southern gateway to Asia, FIFF has been introducing quality Asian films for 26 years, screening 15 – 20 new titles from the region in the main selection, along with dozens of other standout films, including classics. Last year, the festival featured 55 films from 23 countries/regions in the main lineup, and a total of 312 titles from 27 countries/regions when combined with collaborative screenings. Nearly 80 guests were on hand to talk with the 38,000+ attendees (an impressive number for a city whose population is only 1.5 million).
Like most festivals, Fukuoka screens nearly all titles with English subs, so you have a smorgasbord of buzzed-about Asian films to look forward to, including one of our favorite films of last year, the electrically charged black comedy Godspeed (Chung Mong-Hong, Taiwan), the award-winning teens-pervert-standardized-testing tale Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya, Thailand) and the Cannes-premiering Diamond Island, about construction workers in Phnom Penh, by French-Cambodian Davy Chou. There are also screenings of Thailand’s official Oscar candidate for 2017, the extraordinary By the Time It Gets Dark, by Anocha Suwichakornpong, and a special selection of documentaries.
Also among the Asian titles on view is the omnibus Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections, the first coproduction between The Japan Foundation Asia Center and Tokyo International Film Festival. It features short films by the Philippines’ Brillante Ma Mendoza and Cambodia’s Sotho Kulikar, as well as Pigeon, by Japan’s Isao Yukisada. Pigeon stars veteran actor Masahiko Tsugawa as Michisaburo, a lonely widower living in Penang, Malaysia, who raises pigeons. When a new helper arrives to look after him, she triggers memories that Michisaburo had long suppressed. Eventually, a bond starts to form between the two, and the old man lets go of his bitterness.
Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections
dir. :Isao Yukisada
(アジア三面鏡 2016: リフレクションズ, Japanese and English subtitles, 118 min, 2016)
There are limited Japanese films at FIFF, but Su-yeon Gu (Hard Romanticker) is world premiering his new Miko Girl, starring Alice Hirose as Shiwasu, an unconventional shrine priestess who starts looking after a 5-year-old boy, Kenta. Also in the lineup is The Foolish Bird, by the married writing-directing team of Huang Ji (China) and Ryuji Otsuka (Japan), also the cinematographer, about the heartbreaking world of China’s left-behind children, who remain in the villages while their parents go, sometimes forever, to the city to make money.
MIKO GIRL, dir.: Su-yeon Gu
(巫女っちゃけん。 Miko cha'ken, Japanese with English subtitles, 98 min, 2017)
Still think it’s too far to schlep to Shikoku? Maybe this will help change your mind: FIFF is hosting a mini-retrospective of the work of Nobuhiko Obayashi, the legendary director of House —the psychedelic 1977 cult comedy-horror film that brought him to global acclaim some 25 years later, after it was discovered by the West. House is one of three titles screening (without English subs). But the big news is that Obayashi, who has been battling cancer, will be on hand for the world premiere of his new masterwork, Hanagatami.
HANAGATAMI
dir.: Nobuhiko Obayashi
(花筐/HANAGATAMI Japanese with English subtitles, 169 min, 2017)
©唐津映画製作委員会／PSC 2017
A visual feast, as are all the maestro’s singular creations, Hanagatami (based on the novel by Naoki Prizewinner Kazuo Dan) features an intriguing cast of up-and-comers (Shunsuke Kubozuka, Shinnosuke Mitsushima, Keishi Nagatsuka, Tokio Emoto, Honoka Yagahi, Hirona Yamazaki, Mugi Kadowaki, Takako Tokiwa) in a Saga-set antiwar tale of epic proportions. In the bucolic town of the 1930s, as youth come of age and gradually get picked off by the draft, the moon is always full, blossoms bloom and fireflies flit, colors are eye-popping, poetry is on every lip, music swells on the soundtrack, ghosts always return with messages and metaphors are hard to parse.
Obayashi had wanted to film the story for 40 years, and it’s no exaggeration to view it as the culmination of his many impulses and obsessions, his magnum opus — one of the characters even references Sadao Yamanaka’s Humanity and Paper Balloons, the last film the director made before going off to Manchuria, where he died. “If war is worth fighting for,” goes one line in Hanagatami, “so is a festival.” And no one has ever put on a festival like Obayashi.
CANAL CITY HAKATA
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.