OSAKA ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022
Osaka Blends Shorts with Features for Biggest Lineup Yet
Venue(s): ABC Hall, Cine Libre Umeda, Umeda Burg 7, National Museum of Art OsakaMarch 10 (Thu) - March 20 (Sun), 2022. Online: March 3 - March 21, 2022
Language: Multilanguage with Japanese and English subtitles
Official website: www.oaff.jp/2022/en/index.html
Theater website: www.asahi.co.jp/abchall/map/
Tariff: Adults: ¥1,300, Under 22: ¥500 for tickets at door.
Advance tickets: https://www.oaff.jp/2022/en/ticket/index.html
Title: 第17回大阪アジアン映画祭 (Dai 17 Kai Osaka Asian Eigasai)
After successfully braving Covid-19 by running physically for its past two editions, the 17th Osaka Asian Film Festival has now embraced a semi-hybrid presentation. While in-theater screenings comprise the bulk of this year’s run, there will also be an online component featuring prior festival hits. Despite the pandemic-enforced absence of foreign filmmakers and Q&A sessions, OAFF is still Japan’s essential spring festival, a showcase for the discovery of new visions and voices, and the chance to get a first look at the best new films from around the region (almost all with English subs).
Online Films, March 3 - 21
For those unable to make the trip to Osaka between March 10 – 20, OAFF’s Theater One online screenings kick off a week earlier, on March 3, and run through March 21. The select package of 10 films from previous editions includes several unmissable titles, like opening film Torso, the 2009 directorial debut of veteran DP Yutaka Yamazaki (Nobody Knows, Still Walking, The Long Excuse). A psychological melodrama about love, sexuality and self-isolation, it centers on a woman who is obsessed with a male doll torso, and stars the ever-brilliant Makiko Watanabe and Sakura Ando as sisters.
Torso/トルソ
2009｜Japan｜104min
Director: YAMAZAKI Yutaka (山崎裕)
Takuya Misawa’s 2015 Chigasaki Story, also screening online, takes a lighter, more whimsical approach to love and sexuality. A remarkable debut that pays tribute to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, from its setting in a small seaside town to its visual homages (trains coming and going, frames-within-frames and “pillow shot” interludes eliding time), it’s an effervescent comedy of manners anchored by a charming young cast headed by indie queen Kiki Sugino, who also executive produced.
Chigasaki Story/3泊4日、5時の鐘
2014｜Japan, Thailand｜89min
Director: MISAWA Takuya (三澤拓哉)
In-Theater Films, March 10 - 20
As in previous years, OAFF Programming Director Sozo Teruoka and his team have found just the right mix of commercially oriented arthouse fair and edgy work by emerging filmmakers for the festival proper. During its 10-day run, OAFF will present a record number 77 films (although many of them are shorts) from 31 dozen nations and territories (as well as Asia-focused films from beyond the strict confines of the region).
This year, there are 24 world premieres,13 international premieres and 29 Japan premieres vying for prizes and critical attention in various sections: Competition, Spotlight, Indie Forum and Special Screenings, with Special Programs grouped under New Action! Southeast Asia, Taiwan: Movies on the Move and Special Focus on Hong Kong 2022.
For Japanese film aficionados, there is much to savor at this year’s OAFF, including the Opening and Closing films, although neither of them is entirely about Japan or in Japanese.
Opening Film
Yanagawa/漫长的告白
2021｜China, Japan, Korea｜112 min
Director: ZHANG Lu (张律)
The Opening Film is the Japan Premiere of Zhang Lu’s brothers-adrift drama, Yanagawa. While it marks the Korean-Chinese director’s first primarily Chinese-language film in over a decade, the Korea/Japan/China coproduction was filmed mostly in the bucolic Fukuoka town of the title. Along with Chinese stars Ni Ni, Zhang Luyi and Xin Baiqing, it features Japanese actors Sosuke Ikematsu and Ryoko Nakano (one of the first Japanese actresses to attain popularity in China, with the 1976 Manhunt). Yanagawa follows two brothers as they search for the girl they both once loved, who now lives in Japan and sings plaintive tunes in a local live house.
Closing Film
Miss Osaka
2021｜Denmark, Norway, Japan｜90min
Director: Daniel DENCIK
The Closing Film is the Japan Premiere of Danish director Daniel Dencik’s Miss Osaka, a mystery-drama filmed in Norway and Japan. Danish actress Victoria Carmen Sonne (Holiday, Neon Heart) stars as a woman whose chance meeting with a Japanese tourist in Scandinavia leads her to Japan, where she totally reinvents herself as a hostess in the Miss Osaka nightclub. There, she befriends Junko Abe and Kaho Minami, and draws the unwanted attentions of Mirai Moriyama, always a menacing presence. The film blends a variety of genres in its moody, elegiac, playful exploration of identity and self-determination.
Competition
Angry Son/世界は僕らに気づかない
2022｜Japan｜112min
Director: IIZUKA Kasho (飯塚花笑)
The only Japanese film in the 15-film OAFF Competition section, Angry Son is Kasho Iizuka’s third feature, following The World for the Two of Us (2021), which follows a transgender man as he falls in love and grapples with his girlfriend’s desire to have a baby, and the Pia Film Festival Special Jury Prizewinner Our Future (2011), based on his own experience as a transgender person. Angry Son focuses on a young Filipino Japanese man, Jungo (Kazuki Horike), who lives in a dead-end town in Gunma Prefecture. His well-meaning Filipina single mother (Gow) receives the brunt of his blind rage, as he faces xenophobia, homophobia and other types of bullying in his high school, and attempts to find the father he’s aware of only through child-support payments.
Indie Forum
For those seeking fresh Japanese visions, the highlight of every OAFF is the Indie Forum section, which this year screens 20 innovative works (9 features, 11 shorts) by emerging filmmakers and veterans alike, 13 of them world premieres and two of them coproductions (one with Nepal, the other with Hungary). New York City’s venerable Japan Society will bestow the Japan Cuts Award on one of the films, and depending on the Covid situation, proffer an invitation to screen it at the Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film later this year.
Sanka: Nomads of the mountains
山歌（サンカ）
2022｜Japan｜77min
Director: SASATANI Ryohei (笹谷遼平)
Ryohei Sasatani’s Sanka: Nomads of the Mountains is a melancholic paeon to environmental loss and a vanishing way of life, set in Yamanaka in 1965, a time when the Sanka people, a nomadic band of outcasts, are dying out. A lonely high school boy from Tokyo is taken under the wing of three Sanka, including Tokyo Filmgoer favorite Kiyohiko Shibukawa (Lowlife Love, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), and is gradually beguiled by their “backward” backwoods lifestyle. But he soon sees how others discriminate against them, just as his authoritarian father does. Sasatani’s beautifully lensed film reminds us of what happened during the early years of Japanese rapid growth, and underscores the troubled relationship between nature and modernity.
Switchback/スイッチバック
2022｜Japan｜97min
Director: IWATA Shunnosuke (岩田隼之介)
Shunnosuke Iwata’s Switchback considers growth of another kind, bringing together a group of young teens in Aichi Prefecture for a workshop aimed at celebrating their town’s 50th anniversary. Local kids play the film’s central characters, including two who are from the Brazilian community, Arham Butt and Chiemi Yokoyama. While the focus is on how the teens begin to overcome their malaise and pursue their dreams, Switchback also reminds us just how multicultural Japan has become.
Far Away, Further Away/遠くへ，もっと遠くへ
2022｜Japan｜107min
Director: IMAOKA Shinji (いまおかしんじ)
In Shinji Imaoka’s Hokkaido-set Far Away, Further Away, his first feature since Reiko and the Dolphin (at OAFF 2020 and online during this year’s festival), follows an older woman (Manami Shindo), unhappy in her marriage, who meets a real estate agent (Kaito Yoshimura) who’s been abandoned by his wife. Imaoka is a veteran pinku eiga director who also makes family dramas and a range of more mainstream fare, and this one looks to combine a bit of both, in a more upbeat style than some of his other work.
Confession/蜜月
2022｜Japan｜130min
Director: SAKAKI Hideo (榊英雄)
If you’re looking for more overtly sexual relationships on screen, you might want to view Hideo Sakaki’s Confession, an intense melodrama that purports to be a twist on female sexuality. Based on a screenplay by Takehiko Minato (Wilderness, Mother) and starring acclaimed actors Mariko Tsutsui (A Girl Missing) and Masatoshi Nagase (Mystery Train, Sweet Bean), it explores one family’s tragic history of sexual abuse, flashing forward and back over a period of 15 years. Actress Aimi Satsukawa is so committed to the nymphomaniac protagonist’s emotional journey that she creates a convincing vortex of destruction, self and otherwise.
Indie Forum Special Screenings
The Special Screenings sidebar of Indie Forum includes two films that should be on your list. Yoneo Ota’s documentary/propaganda pastiche Sino-Japanese War in a Toy Film, which will be screened with live piano accompaniment by Mie Yanashita.
The Second Sino-Japanese War in Toy Films/おもちゃ映画で見た日中戦争
2022｜Japan｜94min
Director: OTA Yoneo (太田米男)
Tatsuya Matsubara’s YU-GEKI: Side Story of Love's Twisting Path. As the title hints, the film is a making-of documentary shot in 2019, when veteran jidaigeki writer/director Sadao Nakajima returned to the director’s chair at the age of 83 to shoot Love’s Twisting Path, starring Kengo Kora and Seizo Fukumoto.
YU-GEKI~side story of "Love's Twisting Path"~
遊撃 —「多十郎殉愛記」外伝 —
2021｜Japan｜88min
Director: MATSUBARA Tatsuya (松原龍弥)
Indie Forum Director in Focus: Kahori Higashi
OAFF has also selected two women filmmakers to receive Director in Focus sidebars: veteran Satoko Yokohama and emerging talent Kahori Higashi, whose Moosic Lab title Melting Sounds heads into Japanese theaters later this year. The film stars musician Xiangyu as a young woman who visits her grandmother’s house in the country, only to discover that an old man is living in the garden, recording random sounds to take with him when he dies. All reports indicate that it’s a heart-tugging charmer.
Melting Sounds/ほとぼりメルトサウンズ
2021｜Japan｜80min
Director: HIGASHI Kahori (東かほり)
Indie Forum Director in Focus: Satoko Yokohama
While the tribute to Satoko Yokohama won’t include her 2021 OAFF Grand Prix and Audience Award-winning Ito, the festival will showcase a diverse lineup of early shorts, TV episodes and features. In the latter category, here’s your chance to see/revisit the two films that really put her on the map: German plus Rain (2007), about a young apprentice gardener/wannabe singer whose boss calls her gorillaman, a work that won her the Directors Guild of Japan New Director's Award; and Bare Essence of Life (2009), Yokohama’s first Tsugaru-dialect film (the second being Ito), set in her home prefecture of Aomori. It features Kenichi Matsuyama, who shot to stardom playing an eccentric young farmer who falls for a kindergarten teacher (Kumiko Aso).
Bare Essence of Life/ウルトラミラクルラブストーリー
2009｜Japan｜120min
Director: YOKOHAMA Satoko (横浜聡子)
OAFF Theaters
After successfully braving Covid-19 by running physically for its past two editions, the 17th Osaka Asian Film Festival has now embraced a semi-hybrid presentation. While in-theater screenings comprise the bulk of this year’s run, there will also be an online component featuring prior festival hits. Despite the pandemic-enforced absence of foreign filmmakers and Q&A sessions, OAFF is still Japan’s essential spring festival, a showcase for the discovery of new visions and voices, and the chance to get a first look at the best new films from around the region (almost all with English subs).
Online Films, March 3 - 21
For those unable to make the trip to Osaka between March 10 – 20, OAFF’s Theater One online screenings kick off a week earlier, on March 3, and run through March 21. The select package of 10 films from previous editions includes several unmissable titles, like opening film Torso, the 2009 directorial debut of veteran DP Yutaka Yamazaki (Nobody Knows, Still Walking, The Long Excuse). A psychological melodrama about love, sexuality and self-isolation, it centers on a woman who is obsessed with a male doll torso, and stars the ever-brilliant Makiko Watanabe and Sakura Ando as sisters.
Torso/トルソ
2009｜Japan｜104min
Director: YAMAZAKI Yutaka (山崎裕)
Takuya Misawa’s 2015 Chigasaki Story, also screening online, takes a lighter, more whimsical approach to love and sexuality. A remarkable debut that pays tribute to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, from its setting in a small seaside town to its visual homages (trains coming and going, frames-within-frames and “pillow shot” interludes eliding time), it’s an effervescent comedy of manners anchored by a charming young cast headed by indie queen Kiki Sugino, who also executive produced.
Chigasaki Story/3泊4日、5時の鐘
2014｜Japan, Thailand｜89min
Director: MISAWA Takuya (三澤拓哉)
In-Theater Films, March 10 - 20
As in previous years, OAFF Programming Director Sozo Teruoka and his team have found just the right mix of commercially oriented arthouse fair and edgy work by emerging filmmakers for the festival proper. During its 10-day run, OAFF will present a record number 77 films (although many of them are shorts) from 31 dozen nations and territories (as well as Asia-focused films from beyond the strict confines of the region).
This year, there are 24 world premieres,13 international premieres and 29 Japan premieres vying for prizes and critical attention in various sections: Competition, Spotlight, Indie Forum and Special Screenings, with Special Programs grouped under New Action! Southeast Asia, Taiwan: Movies on the Move and Special Focus on Hong Kong 2022.
For Japanese film aficionados, there is much to savor at this year’s OAFF, including the Opening and Closing films, although neither of them is entirely about Japan or in Japanese.
Opening Film
Yanagawa/漫长的告白
2021｜China, Japan, Korea｜112 min
Director: ZHANG Lu (张律)
The Opening Film is the Japan Premiere of Zhang Lu’s brothers-adrift drama, Yanagawa. While it marks the Korean-Chinese director’s first primarily Chinese-language film in over a decade, the Korea/Japan/China coproduction was filmed mostly in the bucolic Fukuoka town of the title. Along with Chinese stars Ni Ni, Zhang Luyi and Xin Baiqing, it features Japanese actors Sosuke Ikematsu and Ryoko Nakano (one of the first Japanese actresses to attain popularity in China, with the 1976 Manhunt). Yanagawa follows two brothers as they search for the girl they both once loved, who now lives in Japan and sings plaintive tunes in a local live house.
Closing Film
Miss Osaka
2021｜Denmark, Norway, Japan｜90min
Director: Daniel DENCIK
The Closing Film is the Japan Premiere of Danish director Daniel Dencik’s Miss Osaka, a mystery-drama filmed in Norway and Japan. Danish actress Victoria Carmen Sonne (Holiday, Neon Heart) stars as a woman whose chance meeting with a Japanese tourist in Scandinavia leads her to Japan, where she totally reinvents herself as a hostess in the Miss Osaka nightclub. There, she befriends Junko Abe and Kaho Minami, and draws the unwanted attentions of Mirai Moriyama, always a menacing presence. The film blends a variety of genres in its moody, elegiac, playful exploration of identity and self-determination.
Competition
Angry Son/世界は僕らに気づかない
2022｜Japan｜112min
Director: IIZUKA Kasho (飯塚花笑)
The only Japanese film in the 15-film OAFF Competition section, Angry Son is Kasho Iizuka’s third feature, following The World for the Two of Us (2021), which follows a transgender man as he falls in love and grapples with his girlfriend’s desire to have a baby, and the Pia Film Festival Special Jury Prizewinner Our Future (2011), based on his own experience as a transgender person. Angry Son focuses on a young Filipino Japanese man, Jungo (Kazuki Horike), who lives in a dead-end town in Gunma Prefecture. His well-meaning Filipina single mother (Gow) receives the brunt of his blind rage, as he faces xenophobia, homophobia and other types of bullying in his high school, and attempts to find the father he’s aware of only through child-support payments.
Indie Forum
For those seeking fresh Japanese visions, the highlight of every OAFF is the Indie Forum section, which this year screens 20 innovative works (9 features, 11 shorts) by emerging filmmakers and veterans alike, 13 of them world premieres and two of them coproductions (one with Nepal, the other with Hungary). New York City’s venerable Japan Society will bestow the Japan Cuts Award on one of the films, and depending on the Covid situation, proffer an invitation to screen it at the Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film later this year.
Sanka: Nomads of the mountains
山歌（サンカ）
2022｜Japan｜77min
Director: SASATANI Ryohei (笹谷遼平)
Ryohei Sasatani’s Sanka: Nomads of the Mountains is a melancholic paeon to environmental loss and a vanishing way of life, set in Yamanaka in 1965, a time when the Sanka people, a nomadic band of outcasts, are dying out. A lonely high school boy from Tokyo is taken under the wing of three Sanka, including Tokyo Filmgoer favorite Kiyohiko Shibukawa (Lowlife Love, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), and is gradually beguiled by their “backward” backwoods lifestyle. But he soon sees how others discriminate against them, just as his authoritarian father does. Sasatani’s beautifully lensed film reminds us of what happened during the early years of Japanese rapid growth, and underscores the troubled relationship between nature and modernity.
Switchback/スイッチバック
2022｜Japan｜97min
Director: IWATA Shunnosuke (岩田隼之介)
Shunnosuke Iwata’s Switchback considers growth of another kind, bringing together a group of young teens in Aichi Prefecture for a workshop aimed at celebrating their town’s 50th anniversary. Local kids play the film’s central characters, including two who are from the Brazilian community, Arham Butt and Chiemi Yokoyama. While the focus is on how the teens begin to overcome their malaise and pursue their dreams, Switchback also reminds us just how multicultural Japan has become.
Far Away, Further Away/遠くへ，もっと遠くへ
2022｜Japan｜107min
Director: IMAOKA Shinji (いまおかしんじ)
In Shinji Imaoka’s Hokkaido-set Far Away, Further Away, his first feature since Reiko and the Dolphin (at OAFF 2020 and online during this year’s festival), follows an older woman (Manami Shindo), unhappy in her marriage, who meets a real estate agent (Kaito Yoshimura) who’s been abandoned by his wife. Imaoka is a veteran pinku eiga director who also makes family dramas and a range of more mainstream fare, and this one looks to combine a bit of both, in a more upbeat style than some of his other work.
Confession/蜜月
2022｜Japan｜130min
Director: SAKAKI Hideo (榊英雄)
If you’re looking for more overtly sexual relationships on screen, you might want to view Hideo Sakaki’s Confession, an intense melodrama that purports to be a twist on female sexuality. Based on a screenplay by Takehiko Minato (Wilderness, Mother) and starring acclaimed actors Mariko Tsutsui (A Girl Missing) and Masatoshi Nagase (Mystery Train, Sweet Bean), it explores one family’s tragic history of sexual abuse, flashing forward and back over a period of 15 years. Actress Aimi Satsukawa is so committed to the nymphomaniac protagonist’s emotional journey that she creates a convincing vortex of destruction, self and otherwise.
Indie Forum Special Screenings
The Special Screenings sidebar of Indie Forum includes two films that should be on your list. Yoneo Ota’s documentary/propaganda pastiche Sino-Japanese War in a Toy Film, which will be screened with live piano accompaniment by Mie Yanashita.
The Second Sino-Japanese War in Toy Films/おもちゃ映画で見た日中戦争
2022｜Japan｜94min
Director: OTA Yoneo (太田米男)
Tatsuya Matsubara’s YU-GEKI: Side Story of Love's Twisting Path. As the title hints, the film is a making-of documentary shot in 2019, when veteran jidaigeki writer/director Sadao Nakajima returned to the director’s chair at the age of 83 to shoot Love’s Twisting Path, starring Kengo Kora and Seizo Fukumoto.
YU-GEKI~side story of "Love's Twisting Path"~
遊撃 —「多十郎殉愛記」外伝 —
2021｜Japan｜88min
Director: MATSUBARA Tatsuya (松原龍弥)
Indie Forum Director in Focus: Kahori Higashi
OAFF has also selected two women filmmakers to receive Director in Focus sidebars: veteran Satoko Yokohama and emerging talent Kahori Higashi, whose Moosic Lab title Melting Sounds heads into Japanese theaters later this year. The film stars musician Xiangyu as a young woman who visits her grandmother’s house in the country, only to discover that an old man is living in the garden, recording random sounds to take with him when he dies. All reports indicate that it’s a heart-tugging charmer.
Melting Sounds/ほとぼりメルトサウンズ
2021｜Japan｜80min
Director: HIGASHI Kahori (東かほり)
Indie Forum Director in Focus: Satoko Yokohama
While the tribute to Satoko Yokohama won’t include her 2021 OAFF Grand Prix and Audience Award-winning Ito, the festival will showcase a diverse lineup of early shorts, TV episodes and features. In the latter category, here’s your chance to see/revisit the two films that really put her on the map: German plus Rain (2007), about a young apprentice gardener/wannabe singer whose boss calls her gorillaman, a work that won her the Directors Guild of Japan New Director's Award; and Bare Essence of Life (2009), Yokohama’s first Tsugaru-dialect film (the second being Ito), set in her home prefecture of Aomori. It features Kenichi Matsuyama, who shot to stardom playing an eccentric young farmer who falls for a kindergarten teacher (Kumiko Aso).
Bare Essence of Life/ウルトラミラクルラブストーリー
2009｜Japan｜120min
Director: YOKOHAMA Satoko (横浜聡子)
OAFF Theaters
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.