SHORT SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL & ASIA 2021 AUTUMN
Winning Work Gets Physical Encores
Venue(s): Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and onlineOct. 21 (Thur) to Oct. 24 (Sun), 2021
Language: Multilanguages, all with English subs
Official website: www.shortshorts.org/2021autumn/en/program/
Theater website: www.shortshorts.org/2021autumn/en/access/
Tariff: Free both online and off
Advance tickets: https://www.shortshorts.org/2021autumn/en/ticket/
Talk event: https://www.shortshorts.org/2021autumn/en/index.php#event
Title: ショートショート フィルムフェスティバル & アジア 2021 秋の映画祭 (SHORT SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL & ASIA 2021 Aki no Eigasai)
Asia’s largest international festival of short-form cinema, the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia (SSFFA), hosts an annual Screening in Autumn event that is currently streaming online free for the entire month of October. But there will also be four free days of encore screenings at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum from Oct. 21-24, including a new world premiere. Featured are the winners from SSFFA’s hybrid main festival in June, all of whom are eligible for an Oscar nomination in 2022, and all are subtitled.
Among the handful of Japanese winners in the selection, there are two that feel jaw-dropping and groundbreaking — and both star the same actress, Hikari Mitsushima (Gukoroku: Traces of Sin, Kakekomi). She won the SSFFA Best Actor Award for her role in A Woman Who Acts, truly one of the most heartachingly beautiful films ever made. In the film, Mitsushima plays Yoshiko, the beautiful young wife of an ailing old man (Toru Shinagawa), whom she alternately taunts and pleases. The final scene, in which she sings an Okinawan love song at his hospital window, is really one of the most inventive in cinema history.
A Woman Who Acts
Dir: Toshiyuki Teruya/0:18:30/Japan/Drama/2020
Director Toshiyuki Teruya had come to acclaim with his SSFFA-winning short Born, Bone, Born, which he made into a 2018 feature-length film with the same title. It was a record-breaking hit in Okinawa Prefecture, where both he and Mitsushima grew up, and won the Audience Award at Japan Cuts in New York, among numerous other awards at international film festivals.
Mitsushima is even more delightful playing multiple characters in the impossible-to-describe Flash! Minamishimabara News Agency (Special Edition), which won the SSFFA Visual Tourism Award, and the Japan Tourism Agency Commissioner's Award. While the city of Minami Shimabara exists in the far west of Nagasaki Prefecture, and there is apparently a popular weekend show covering the area’s many attractions—from pristine beaches to playful bottle-nosed dolphins to somen noodles—this “special edition” is essentially a parody, with brief comedy sketches gently skewering quirky local residents.
Flash! Minamishimabara News Agency (Special Edition)
0:26:49 / Japan / PR / 2021
Mitsushima plays several of these, but her shining moments are in the show’s faux commercials for the UNESCO World Heritage Site Hara Castle, in which she portrays teen hero Amakusa Shiro, the 16th-century leader of the Shimabara Rebellion, an uprising of Roman Catholics against the Shogunate. He has been immortalized as a bishonen in the “Fates/Grand Order” manga series, and it is this incarnation that Mitsushima adopts, flipping her ponytail wildly and flouncing around against stunning scenery.
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Asia’s largest international festival of short-form cinema, the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia (SSFFA), hosts an annual Screening in Autumn event that is currently streaming online free for the entire month of October. But there will also be four free days of encore screenings at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum from Oct. 21-24, including a new world premiere. Featured are the winners from SSFFA’s hybrid main festival in June, all of whom are eligible for an Oscar nomination in 2022, and all are subtitled.
Among the handful of Japanese winners in the selection, there are two that feel jaw-dropping and groundbreaking — and both star the same actress, Hikari Mitsushima (Gukoroku: Traces of Sin, Kakekomi). She won the SSFFA Best Actor Award for her role in A Woman Who Acts, truly one of the most heartachingly beautiful films ever made. In the film, Mitsushima plays Yoshiko, the beautiful young wife of an ailing old man (Toru Shinagawa), whom she alternately taunts and pleases. The final scene, in which she sings an Okinawan love song at his hospital window, is really one of the most inventive in cinema history.
A Woman Who Acts
Dir: Toshiyuki Teruya/0:18:30/Japan/Drama/2020
Director Toshiyuki Teruya had come to acclaim with his SSFFA-winning short Born, Bone, Born, which he made into a 2018 feature-length film with the same title. It was a record-breaking hit in Okinawa Prefecture, where both he and Mitsushima grew up, and won the Audience Award at Japan Cuts in New York, among numerous other awards at international film festivals.
Mitsushima is even more delightful playing multiple characters in the impossible-to-describe Flash! Minamishimabara News Agency (Special Edition), which won the SSFFA Visual Tourism Award, and the Japan Tourism Agency Commissioner's Award. While the city of Minami Shimabara exists in the far west of Nagasaki Prefecture, and there is apparently a popular weekend show covering the area’s many attractions—from pristine beaches to playful bottle-nosed dolphins to somen noodles—this “special edition” is essentially a parody, with brief comedy sketches gently skewering quirky local residents.
Flash! Minamishimabara News Agency (Special Edition)
0:26:49 / Japan / PR / 2021
Mitsushima plays several of these, but her shining moments are in the show’s faux commercials for the UNESCO World Heritage Site Hara Castle, in which she portrays teen hero Amakusa Shiro, the 16th-century leader of the Shimabara Rebellion, an uprising of Roman Catholics against the Shogunate. He has been immortalized as a bishonen in the “Fates/Grand Order” manga series, and it is this incarnation that Mitsushima adopts, flipping her ponytail wildly and flouncing around against stunning scenery.
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.