OSAKA ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2021
The Show Must Go On in Kansai
Venue(s): ABC Hall, Cine Libre Umeda, Umeda Burg 7March 5 (Fri) - March 14 (Sun), 2021: visit official site: https://www.oaff.jp/2021/en/schedule/index.html
Language: Multilanguage with Japanese and English subtitles
Official website: www.oaff.jp/2021/en/index.html
Theater website: www.asahi.co.jp/abchall/map/
Tariff: Adults: ¥1,300, Under 22: ¥500 for tickets at door.
Advance tickets: http://www.oaff.jp/2021/en/ticket/index.html
Title: 第16回大阪アジアン映画祭 (Osaka Asian Film Festival 2021)
For the second year in a row, the Osaka Asian Film Festival is going ahead with a physical edition, despite the insurmountable challenges of bringing over foreign filmmakers and hosting Q&A sessions. While the presence of creators is a seemingly essential facet of film festivals, so is big-screen projection and the discovery of new visions and voices. For those with the time and at least a shinkansen proximity to Japan’s second city, the 16th edition of OAFF provides a first look at the best new films from around the region.
(For those unable to make the trip, OAFF is screening online a select package of films from prior editions, running February 28 - March 20, several of which are worth revisiting, including Bilal Kawazoe’s 2019 award winner Whole, a mid-length portrait of a biracial youth exploring his roots in Japan.)
As in previous years, the festival boasts just the right mix of commercially-oriented arthouse fair and edgy work by debuting filmmakers, and nearly all of the films will be screened with English subtitles. You would be forgiven for wondering just how Programming Director Sozo Teruoka and his team managed to find so many impressive titles amid the pandemic.
During OAFF’s 10-day run, from March 5 – 14, films from some 2 dozen nations and territories (as well as Asia-focused films from beyond the strict confines of the region) will vie for critical attention and prizes. This year, there are 20 world premieres,10 international premieres and 2 Asian premieres (all the others are Japan premieres) playing in various sections: Competition, Spotlight, Indie Forum and Special Screenings, with Special Programs grouped under New Action! Southeast Asia, Taiwan: Movies on the Move, Classic and Contemporary, and Special Focus on Hong Kong 2021.
Opening Film
Keep Rolling/好好拍電影/映画をつづける
2020｜Hong Kong｜118min
Director: MAN Lim-chung (文念中)
The Opening Film, Keep Rolling, has an indirect connection to Japan through its subject, acclaimed Hong Kong auteur Ann Hui, whose mom was Japanese. Veteran art director/costume designer Man Lim-chung’s directorial debut shines the spotlight on the 7 decades of Hui’s life and art, culminating in her appearance at the Venice International Film Festival last year, where she was given the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Closing Film
The Asian Angel/アジアの天使
2021｜Japan｜128min
Director: ISHII Yuya (石井裕也)
But for Japanese film aficionados, there is much to savor at this year’s OAFF, including the Closing Film, which was shot entirely in Korea, with much of the dialogue in Korean, but isn’t quite Korean. Yuya Ishii’s The Asian Angel stars Sosuke Ikematsu and Joe Odagiri — as estranged brothers! — as well as Moon Choi, in a cross-cultural family drama/road trip/grief recovery story with magical realist touches and an adorable child (the silent son of Ikematsu’s character).
Takeshi (Ikematsu) is a novelist and grieving widower who jumps at the chance to reconnect with Toru (Odagiri), who invites him to start life anew in Seoul, where he runs a thriving business. When Takeshi and his son Manabu arrive, however, they discover that things are not as expected. When Takeshi later hears Seo (Choi) singing at a forlorn shopping mall, he’s smitten. Fortunately, fate brings them repeatedly together, along with her brother and sister, and soon both families are overcoming communication problems (and some pesky gangsters) as they help each other on twin journeys of reconciliation.
Competition
Hotel Iris/艾莉絲旅館
2021｜Japan, Taiwan｜100min
Director: OKUHARA Hiroshi (奥原浩志)
The wide-ranging 14-film Competition section includes films from as far afield as Canada and Ecuador/Uruguay (the latter, Paul Venegas’ dramatic portrait of illegal Chinese immigrants trying to survive in South America, Emptiness, is a must see), as well as the world premieres of two films by Japanese directors. Hiroshi Okuhara’s Hotel Iris is based on Yoko Ogawa’s dark and disturbing novel of sadomasochistic love, and stars stalwart Masatoshi Nagase as an enigmatic translator (and possible serial murderer) who lives on a mysterious island near the eponymous hotel, which Okuhara has moved from Japan to somewhere on the Taiwanese coast.
When 17-year-old Mari (single-named Japanese-Taiwanese actress Lucia) hears him verbally abusing a guest at her mother’s seedy hotel one night, she’s immediately mesmerized by his voice. Never mind that the poor woman turns up dead. When the translator spots her following him one day, she agrees to a date… and so begins her education in his particular brand of eroticism, which despite the intense violence he subjects Mari to, she continues to crave. Look for a series of increasingly strange cameo moments by Tsai Ming-liang muse Lee Kang-sheng.
Ito/いとみち
2021｜Japan｜116min
Director: YOKOHAMA Satoko (横浜聡子)
On the other end of the spectrum is Ito, the long-awaited new film from Satoko Yokohama (The Actor). It also focuses on a shy young woman in the countryside, Ito (Ren Komai), but her relationships with men, especially her father, Koichi (Etsushi Toyokawa) are decidedly less fraught.
Set on the Tsugaru Peninsula in Aomori Prefecture, the home prefecture of both the director and her star, the dramedy follows Ito as she starts working in a maid café, which greatly concerns her dad. A gifted Tsugaru shamisen player like her late mother, Ito has long relied on the instrument to communicate for her, but her new job gradually helps her overcome her shyness, find her own voice and earn new confidence.
Special Screenings
There are two standout Japanese coproductions in the Special Screenings section, both of them shot in Japan but focusing on the lives of immigrants from Southeast Asia, and both shown at the Tokyo International Film Festival last fall, where they had their world premieres.
Along the Sea/海辺の彼女たち
2020｜Japan, Vietnam｜88min
Director: FUJIMOTO Akio (藤元明緒)
Akio Fujimoto returns to OAFF (his award-winning Passage of Life played in the 2017 edition) with his second film about migrant workers, with this one torn straight out of recent headlines (which started appearing only after the film’s premiere). Along the Sea follows three young Vietnamese “technical trainees,” Phuong (Hoang Phuong), An (Huynh Tuyet Anh) and Nhu (Quynh Nhu), who decide to escape the exploitation they’ve been subjected to by running away under cover of night, leaving their precious documents behind with their employer. They arrive in a snowy fishing town, where a contact has found them better-paying jobs at a fishing cooperative, as well as more spacious (if chilly) rooms.
All is going well until Phuong’s stomach pains worsen, and she’s unable to get treatment without a national health insurance card (or at least some kind of ID). Her deteriorating health creates a dilemma for the other women, especially after she says she’s going to buy a “residence card.” An and Nhu tell her not to mention their names if she gets caught, and a rift cracks open. But there is far worse to come.
Come and Go/カム・アンド・ゴー
2020｜Japan, Malaysia｜158min
Director: LIM Kah-wai (林家威)
Lim Kah-wai’s energetic dramedy Come and Go, a Japan-Malaysia coproduction, is proof, for anyone who’s forgotten, that Osaka really is Japan’s gateway to the world, especially the Asian world. Malaysian auteur Lim has long been a local, graduating from Osaka University and making the city his home for the past 2 decades. After directing several films in China and most recently, two cleverly-titled films in Europe, No Where, Now Here and Somewhen, Somewhere (which played at OAFF in 2019), he has turned his lens on his adopted city and created the ultimate insider’s portrait.
Come and Go is a multilayered, multilingual portrait of Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and Japanese dreamers, strivers, arrivistes, naïfs and even a pair of sweet sweethearts (a Nepali man and his Japanese-language teacher, played by indie queen Makiko Watanabe), all looking for a way to connect and stay afloat. And then there’s Lee Kang-sheng’s character, who’s visiting Osaka on a hunt for his favorite AV actress…
Over the Town/街の上で
2019｜Japan｜130min
Director: IMAIZUMI Rikiya (今泉力哉)
Love and the Grand Tug-of-war/大綱引の恋
2020年｜Japan｜108min
Director: SASABE Kiyoshi (佐々部清)
The final film from Kiyoshi Sasabe (My SO Has Got Depression, Legacy of the Sun), who died late last year, is also being shown in Special Screenings. Love and the Grand Tug-of-War stars Takahiro Miura as Takeshi, a young man who returns from Tokyo to his hometown in Sendai after the 2009 financial meltdown and repeatedly butts heads with his father, who expects him to be married by now. They are finally brought together by the region’s 400-year-old Otsunahiki tradition, which features nearly 3,000 men in a great tug-of-war with an enormous rope that all the locals have woven for the festival.
Indie Forum
B/B
2020｜Japan｜77min
Director: NAKAHAMA Kosuke (中濱宏介)
Highlights in the section include Kosuke Nakahama’s B/B, which world premiered at the Skip City International D-Cinema Festival in 2020. It opens with a quote from Exodus by way of explaining the title: “An eye for an eye… a bruise for a bruise,” and it’s best not to forget that. Hyper-stylized and exceedingly pop-culture savvy, the smash-edited, dialogue-laden story concerns a high school girl named Sanagi (Karen) with disassociate personality disorder — we meet 5 distinct personas — who is a person of interest in a murder because she knew the victim's son Shiro (Koshin Nakazawa). As Sanagi is questioned by a detective and a psychiatrist — the inquisition forms the core of the film — we discover that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were cancelled due to government corruption, and that yet another cult has attempted to poison innocent victims. These are not, however, the film's most shocking events.
Green Jail/綠色牢籠
2021｜Japan, Taiwan, France｜101min
Director: HUANG Yin-yu (黃胤毓)
The Japan/Taiwan/France documentary Green Jail, by Huang Yin-yu, tells the story of a former coal mining village in the jungles of Iriomote Island, Okinawa, through one of its surviving eyewitnesses, 90-year-old Yoshiko Hashima. At one time, it employed thousands of miners from Japan and its colonies, Taiwan and Korea. Hashima’s adoptive father was the head of the Taiwanese miners, and the community had its own currency, schools and way of life. The film deploys archival footage, photos and dramatic recreations, as well as recordings of actual miners, as Grandma Hashima recalls the hidden history of the Green Jail while spending her final days on the island.
JOINT
2020｜Japan｜118min
Director: KOJIMA Oudai (小島央大)
New York City-bred Kojima Oudai’s Joint takes a well-worn genre, the yakuza crime thriller, and gets just about everything right, marking an impressive feature debut. After Takeshi (Ikken Yamamoto) is released from prison, he works doggedly in construction, determined to go straight. But he owes a final payment to the mob, and with the help of a Korean friend, sets up a business providing data for phone scams that yields unexpected results. Then, just as Takeshi is about to finally break free, a war between rival yakuza clans pulls him back into the underworld and threatens to engulf him.
OAFF Theaters
Osaka Asian Film Festival 2021 — 第16回大阪アジアン映画祭
Venue: ABC Hall, Cine Libre Umeda, Umeda Burg 7
Dates: March 5 (Fri) - March 14 (Sun), 2021
Official website: www.oaff.jp/2021/en/index.html
For the second year in a row, the Osaka Asian Film Festival is going ahead with a physical edition, despite the insurmountable challenges of bringing over foreign filmmakers and hosting Q&A sessions. While the presence of creators is a seemingly essential facet of film festivals, so is big-screen projection and the discovery of new visions and voices. For those with the time and at least a shinkansen proximity to Japan’s second city, the 16th edition of OAFF provides a first look at the best new films from around the region.
(For those unable to make the trip, OAFF is screening online a select package of films from prior editions, running February 28 - March 20, several of which are worth revisiting, including Bilal Kawazoe’s 2019 award winner Whole, a mid-length portrait of a biracial youth exploring his roots in Japan.)
As in previous years, the festival boasts just the right mix of commercially-oriented arthouse fair and edgy work by debuting filmmakers, and nearly all of the films will be screened with English subtitles. You would be forgiven for wondering just how Programming Director Sozo Teruoka and his team managed to find so many impressive titles amid the pandemic.
During OAFF’s 10-day run, from March 5 – 14, films from some 2 dozen nations and territories (as well as Asia-focused films from beyond the strict confines of the region) will vie for critical attention and prizes. This year, there are 20 world premieres,10 international premieres and 2 Asian premieres (all the others are Japan premieres) playing in various sections: Competition, Spotlight, Indie Forum and Special Screenings, with Special Programs grouped under New Action! Southeast Asia, Taiwan: Movies on the Move, Classic and Contemporary, and Special Focus on Hong Kong 2021.
Opening Film
Keep Rolling/好好拍電影/映画をつづける
2020｜Hong Kong｜118min
Director: MAN Lim-chung (文念中)
The Opening Film, Keep Rolling, has an indirect connection to Japan through its subject, acclaimed Hong Kong auteur Ann Hui, whose mom was Japanese. Veteran art director/costume designer Man Lim-chung’s directorial debut shines the spotlight on the 7 decades of Hui’s life and art, culminating in her appearance at the Venice International Film Festival last year, where she was given the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Closing Film
The Asian Angel/アジアの天使
2021｜Japan｜128min
Director: ISHII Yuya (石井裕也)
But for Japanese film aficionados, there is much to savor at this year’s OAFF, including the Closing Film, which was shot entirely in Korea, with much of the dialogue in Korean, but isn’t quite Korean. Yuya Ishii’s The Asian Angel stars Sosuke Ikematsu and Joe Odagiri — as estranged brothers! — as well as Moon Choi, in a cross-cultural family drama/road trip/grief recovery story with magical realist touches and an adorable child (the silent son of Ikematsu’s character).
Takeshi (Ikematsu) is a novelist and grieving widower who jumps at the chance to reconnect with Toru (Odagiri), who invites him to start life anew in Seoul, where he runs a thriving business. When Takeshi and his son Manabu arrive, however, they discover that things are not as expected. When Takeshi later hears Seo (Choi) singing at a forlorn shopping mall, he’s smitten. Fortunately, fate brings them repeatedly together, along with her brother and sister, and soon both families are overcoming communication problems (and some pesky gangsters) as they help each other on twin journeys of reconciliation.
Competition
Hotel Iris/艾莉絲旅館
2021｜Japan, Taiwan｜100min
Director: OKUHARA Hiroshi (奥原浩志)
The wide-ranging 14-film Competition section includes films from as far afield as Canada and Ecuador/Uruguay (the latter, Paul Venegas’ dramatic portrait of illegal Chinese immigrants trying to survive in South America, Emptiness, is a must see), as well as the world premieres of two films by Japanese directors. Hiroshi Okuhara’s Hotel Iris is based on Yoko Ogawa’s dark and disturbing novel of sadomasochistic love, and stars stalwart Masatoshi Nagase as an enigmatic translator (and possible serial murderer) who lives on a mysterious island near the eponymous hotel, which Okuhara has moved from Japan to somewhere on the Taiwanese coast.
When 17-year-old Mari (single-named Japanese-Taiwanese actress Lucia) hears him verbally abusing a guest at her mother’s seedy hotel one night, she’s immediately mesmerized by his voice. Never mind that the poor woman turns up dead. When the translator spots her following him one day, she agrees to a date… and so begins her education in his particular brand of eroticism, which despite the intense violence he subjects Mari to, she continues to crave. Look for a series of increasingly strange cameo moments by Tsai Ming-liang muse Lee Kang-sheng.
Ito/いとみち
2021｜Japan｜116min
Director: YOKOHAMA Satoko (横浜聡子)
On the other end of the spectrum is Ito, the long-awaited new film from Satoko Yokohama (The Actor). It also focuses on a shy young woman in the countryside, Ito (Ren Komai), but her relationships with men, especially her father, Koichi (Etsushi Toyokawa) are decidedly less fraught.
Set on the Tsugaru Peninsula in Aomori Prefecture, the home prefecture of both the director and her star, the dramedy follows Ito as she starts working in a maid café, which greatly concerns her dad. A gifted Tsugaru shamisen player like her late mother, Ito has long relied on the instrument to communicate for her, but her new job gradually helps her overcome her shyness, find her own voice and earn new confidence.
Special Screenings
There are two standout Japanese coproductions in the Special Screenings section, both of them shot in Japan but focusing on the lives of immigrants from Southeast Asia, and both shown at the Tokyo International Film Festival last fall, where they had their world premieres.
Along the Sea/海辺の彼女たち
2020｜Japan, Vietnam｜88min
Director: FUJIMOTO Akio (藤元明緒)
Akio Fujimoto returns to OAFF (his award-winning Passage of Life played in the 2017 edition) with his second film about migrant workers, with this one torn straight out of recent headlines (which started appearing only after the film’s premiere). Along the Sea follows three young Vietnamese “technical trainees,” Phuong (Hoang Phuong), An (Huynh Tuyet Anh) and Nhu (Quynh Nhu), who decide to escape the exploitation they’ve been subjected to by running away under cover of night, leaving their precious documents behind with their employer. They arrive in a snowy fishing town, where a contact has found them better-paying jobs at a fishing cooperative, as well as more spacious (if chilly) rooms.
All is going well until Phuong’s stomach pains worsen, and she’s unable to get treatment without a national health insurance card (or at least some kind of ID). Her deteriorating health creates a dilemma for the other women, especially after she says she’s going to buy a “residence card.” An and Nhu tell her not to mention their names if she gets caught, and a rift cracks open. But there is far worse to come.
Come and Go/カム・アンド・ゴー
2020｜Japan, Malaysia｜158min
Director: LIM Kah-wai (林家威)
Lim Kah-wai’s energetic dramedy Come and Go, a Japan-Malaysia coproduction, is proof, for anyone who’s forgotten, that Osaka really is Japan’s gateway to the world, especially the Asian world. Malaysian auteur Lim has long been a local, graduating from Osaka University and making the city his home for the past 2 decades. After directing several films in China and most recently, two cleverly-titled films in Europe, No Where, Now Here and Somewhen, Somewhere (which played at OAFF in 2019), he has turned his lens on his adopted city and created the ultimate insider’s portrait.
Come and Go is a multilayered, multilingual portrait of Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and Japanese dreamers, strivers, arrivistes, naïfs and even a pair of sweet sweethearts (a Nepali man and his Japanese-language teacher, played by indie queen Makiko Watanabe), all looking for a way to connect and stay afloat. And then there’s Lee Kang-sheng’s character, who’s visiting Osaka on a hunt for his favorite AV actress…
Over the Town/街の上で
2019｜Japan｜130min
Director: IMAIZUMI Rikiya (今泉力哉)
Love and the Grand Tug-of-war/大綱引の恋
2020年｜Japan｜108min
Director: SASABE Kiyoshi (佐々部清)
The final film from Kiyoshi Sasabe (My SO Has Got Depression, Legacy of the Sun), who died late last year, is also being shown in Special Screenings. Love and the Grand Tug-of-War stars Takahiro Miura as Takeshi, a young man who returns from Tokyo to his hometown in Sendai after the 2009 financial meltdown and repeatedly butts heads with his father, who expects him to be married by now. They are finally brought together by the region’s 400-year-old Otsunahiki tradition, which features nearly 3,000 men in a great tug-of-war with an enormous rope that all the locals have woven for the festival.
Indie Forum
B/B
2020｜Japan｜77min
Director: NAKAHAMA Kosuke (中濱宏介)
Highlights in the section include Kosuke Nakahama’s B/B, which world premiered at the Skip City International D-Cinema Festival in 2020. It opens with a quote from Exodus by way of explaining the title: “An eye for an eye… a bruise for a bruise,” and it’s best not to forget that. Hyper-stylized and exceedingly pop-culture savvy, the smash-edited, dialogue-laden story concerns a high school girl named Sanagi (Karen) with disassociate personality disorder — we meet 5 distinct personas — who is a person of interest in a murder because she knew the victim's son Shiro (Koshin Nakazawa). As Sanagi is questioned by a detective and a psychiatrist — the inquisition forms the core of the film — we discover that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were cancelled due to government corruption, and that yet another cult has attempted to poison innocent victims. These are not, however, the film's most shocking events.
Green Jail/綠色牢籠
2021｜Japan, Taiwan, France｜101min
Director: HUANG Yin-yu (黃胤毓)
The Japan/Taiwan/France documentary Green Jail, by Huang Yin-yu, tells the story of a former coal mining village in the jungles of Iriomote Island, Okinawa, through one of its surviving eyewitnesses, 90-year-old Yoshiko Hashima. At one time, it employed thousands of miners from Japan and its colonies, Taiwan and Korea. Hashima’s adoptive father was the head of the Taiwanese miners, and the community had its own currency, schools and way of life. The film deploys archival footage, photos and dramatic recreations, as well as recordings of actual miners, as Grandma Hashima recalls the hidden history of the Green Jail while spending her final days on the island.
JOINT
2020｜Japan｜118min
Director: KOJIMA Oudai (小島央大)
New York City-bred Kojima Oudai’s Joint takes a well-worn genre, the yakuza crime thriller, and gets just about everything right, marking an impressive feature debut. After Takeshi (Ikken Yamamoto) is released from prison, he works doggedly in construction, determined to go straight. But he owes a final payment to the mob, and with the help of a Korean friend, sets up a business providing data for phone scams that yields unexpected results. Then, just as Takeshi is about to finally break free, a war between rival yakuza clans pulls him back into the underworld and threatens to engulf him.
OAFF Theaters
Osaka Asian Film Festival 2021 — 第16回大阪アジアン映画祭
Venue: ABC Hall, Cine Libre Umeda, Umeda Burg 7
Dates: March 5 (Fri) - March 14 (Sun), 2021
Official website: www.oaff.jp/2021/en/index.html
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.