TOKYO FILMeX 2021
New Leadership, Same Curatorial Excellence
Venue(s): Yurakucho Asahi Hall, Human Trust Cinema YurakuchoOct. 30 (Sat) – Nov. 7 (Sun), 2021. details: https://filmex.jp/2021en/schedule
Language: All Japanese films are with English subtitles
Official website: filmex.net/2021en/
Theater website: filmex.jp/2021/map
Tariff: General: ￥1,900, Under 25: ￥1,300. Go to https://filmex.jp/2021/ticket
Advance tickets: General: ￥1,400, Under 25: ¥1,000. Go to https://filmex.jp/2021/ticket
Talk event: Visit official site for details: https://filmex.jp/2021en/guest
Title: 第22回 東京フィルメックス (Dai 22 Kai TOKYO FILMeX)
For the second year, Tokyo FILMeX is running at the same time as the Tokyo International Film Festival, part of a collaborative arrangement that has been likened to the relationship of the Cannes Film Festival to famed sidebars Cannes Critic’s Week and Cannes Director’s Fortnight. The difference this year is that TIFF has moved into the Hibiya/Yurakucho/Ginza area, so the festivals are physically adjacent. After FILMeX founder Shozo Ichiyama left for TIFF’s top job earlier this year, a “new” programming director, longtime FILMeX No. 2 Naoki Kamiya, moved into the position. Thus, the festival’s 22nd edition features the same dedication to the meticulously curated lineup as all the prior editions, and films will screen with English subtitles.
The local favorite of cinephiles, FILMeX will run for nine days, from October 30 - November 9, at its home base in Yurakucho Asahi Hall, with expanded screenings and late shows of select titles in the nearby Yurakucho Human Trust.
With jury chair Nobuhiro Suwa (The Phone of the Wind) presiding, the panel will award a Grand Prize (¥700,000) and the Special Jury Prize (¥500,000). There is also an Audience Award chosen from among all sections, and the Student Jury Prize.
Opening film
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Japan / 2021 / 121 min
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
It’s unlikely you’ve not heard of Hamaguchi, considering that this is undeniably his year. After he’d earned renewed name recognition in 2020 with overseas acclaim for Wife of a Spy, which he cowrote with his former teacher, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy played at the Berlin International Film Festival and received the Silver Bear. Less than 2 months later, he was in Cannes with another new film, Drive My Car, and he snagged the Best Screenplay award.
Wheel is an anthology of 3 short films, each completely different but also sharing the themes of chance and yearning. A master of minimalism and minute detail, Hamaguchi’s stories are always very talky, and the conversations always quite unexpected. In this work, he starts with two women in a taxi discussing a love interest, moves on to a woman who helps her boyfriend take revenge on a professor who’s almost hilariously scrupulous about avoiding any hint of teacher-student interaction, and finally, shows the reunion of two women who went to the same high school (or did they?) but took completely different paths in life. Seemingly straightforward in this brief description, each story is a masterclass in how to sustain interest even in mundane settings, and to produce a jolt of surprise each time you least anticipate it.
Competition Films
The 10-film Competition section features some of this year’s most buzzed-about Asian titles from other festivals, so be sure to read the lineup carefully. But Tokyo Filmgoer is concerned only with the Japanese titles, and this year, there is but one in the lineup:
Graveyard of Youth
Japan / 2021 / 96 min
Director: Yosuke Okuda
If you’ve been in Japan long enough, you may recall this title, at least in Japanese (Seishun Hakaba). Although he hasn’t yet used the direct translation in English, Okuda began his career with three films originally titled Seishun Hakaba: Hot as Hell (2007, his short graduation film), Hot as Hell 2 (2008, short), and Hot as Hell: The Deadbeat March (2010), which won him the Grand Prix at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival and played at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. With Tokyo Playboy Club (2011), he stepped it up a notch, receiving widespread overseas acclaim. He now returns to FILMeX competition with his first new film since The Dork, the Girl and the Douchebag (2015).
And once again, Okuda plays one of the characters — an employee at a popular Chinese restaurant who gets involved with a female coworker’s son who is being bullied in high school. But there are other characters, parallel storylines and, as always with an Okuda film, short, sharp violence and related comedy. If you enjoyed his earlier work, you’ll be happy to see him back.
Special Screenings
The World of You
Japan / 2021 / 89 min
Director: Akihiko Shiota
After a very productive early career (1999-2007), Akihiko Shiota has gradually slowed his output, releasing just two films in the past 5 years, one of them, Wet Woman in the Wind (2016), part of the Nikkatsu Roman Porno Reboot project. In 2019, his Farewell Song earned mild interest for its two stars, Mugi Kadowaki and Nana Komatsu, who form an indie singing duo, travel around to gigs, suddenly get popular, and decide to disband.
His new one is focused on an even younger set of musicians, two high school girls from different social classes who decide to form a band. One of them has a fatal illness, the other is self-destructive but has a beautiful voice, and the director wrote the script with actresses Yuzumi Shintani and Marin Hidaka in mind, so their performances fit like a glove.
Made in Japan
This new 4-film section features Kenji Hamauchi’s Dawning on Us, the omnibus effort Made in Yamato, by Masanori Tominaga, Yui Kiyohara, Akira Yamamoto, Risa Takeuchi, Daisuke Miyazaki and Masakazu Kaneko, and Masakazu Kaneko’s dark fantasy Ring Wandering, starring Sho Kasamatsu and Junko Abe.
You should certainly check those out. But the one everyone’s talking about is:
Haruhara-san's Recorder
Japan / 2021 / 120 min
Director: Kyoshi Sugita
After Sugita’s film world premiered at the International Film Festival Marseille and won the Audience Award, Acting Award and the Grand Prix, overseas programmers pounced. It went from there to the venerable New York Film Festival and is likely to see widespread festival play. Before Ryosuke Hamaguchi, a film this bland looking and seemingly incident free would probably be seen only by Japanese film aficionados. Although Sugita (like Hamaguchi a Kiyoshi Kurosawa protégé) has seen two previous films play in the Tokyo International Film Festival (Listen To Light, A Song I Remember), Haruhara-san’s Recorder is a better fit with FILMeX. Ostensibly the story of a woman who is making a fresh start after the tragic death of her partner, and the friends and relatives who care enough to check up on her frequently, the film is extremely oblique.
The source material, a Japanese tanka by poet Naoko Higashi, is translated as: “Gazing on / The stamp of address unknown / The recorder / Played by Haruhara-san.” In the film, there is indeed an envelope with an “address unknown” stamp, and a recorder, but we never learn who Haruhara-san is, nor how s/he might be related to the protagonist. Still, the accretion of mundane scenes, the long takes, the unusual encounters and the casual conversations over coffee or a meal remind us of the style of other arthouse films, and encourage us to put the pieces together.
Yurakucho Asahi Hall, Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho
For the second year, Tokyo FILMeX is running at the same time as the Tokyo International Film Festival, part of a collaborative arrangement that has been likened to the relationship of the Cannes Film Festival to famed sidebars Cannes Critic’s Week and Cannes Director’s Fortnight. The difference this year is that TIFF has moved into the Hibiya/Yurakucho/Ginza area, so the festivals are physically adjacent. After FILMeX founder Shozo Ichiyama left for TIFF’s top job earlier this year, a “new” programming director, longtime FILMeX No. 2 Naoki Kamiya, moved into the position. Thus, the festival’s 22nd edition features the same dedication to the meticulously curated lineup as all the prior editions, and films will screen with English subtitles.
The local favorite of cinephiles, FILMeX will run for nine days, from October 30 - November 9, at its home base in Yurakucho Asahi Hall, with expanded screenings and late shows of select titles in the nearby Yurakucho Human Trust.
With jury chair Nobuhiro Suwa (The Phone of the Wind) presiding, the panel will award a Grand Prize (¥700,000) and the Special Jury Prize (¥500,000). There is also an Audience Award chosen from among all sections, and the Student Jury Prize.
Opening film
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Japan / 2021 / 121 min
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
It’s unlikely you’ve not heard of Hamaguchi, considering that this is undeniably his year. After he’d earned renewed name recognition in 2020 with overseas acclaim for Wife of a Spy, which he cowrote with his former teacher, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy played at the Berlin International Film Festival and received the Silver Bear. Less than 2 months later, he was in Cannes with another new film, Drive My Car, and he snagged the Best Screenplay award.
Wheel is an anthology of 3 short films, each completely different but also sharing the themes of chance and yearning. A master of minimalism and minute detail, Hamaguchi’s stories are always very talky, and the conversations always quite unexpected. In this work, he starts with two women in a taxi discussing a love interest, moves on to a woman who helps her boyfriend take revenge on a professor who’s almost hilariously scrupulous about avoiding any hint of teacher-student interaction, and finally, shows the reunion of two women who went to the same high school (or did they?) but took completely different paths in life. Seemingly straightforward in this brief description, each story is a masterclass in how to sustain interest even in mundane settings, and to produce a jolt of surprise each time you least anticipate it.
Competition Films
The 10-film Competition section features some of this year’s most buzzed-about Asian titles from other festivals, so be sure to read the lineup carefully. But Tokyo Filmgoer is concerned only with the Japanese titles, and this year, there is but one in the lineup:
Graveyard of Youth
Japan / 2021 / 96 min
Director: Yosuke Okuda
If you’ve been in Japan long enough, you may recall this title, at least in Japanese (Seishun Hakaba). Although he hasn’t yet used the direct translation in English, Okuda began his career with three films originally titled Seishun Hakaba: Hot as Hell (2007, his short graduation film), Hot as Hell 2 (2008, short), and Hot as Hell: The Deadbeat March (2010), which won him the Grand Prix at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival and played at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. With Tokyo Playboy Club (2011), he stepped it up a notch, receiving widespread overseas acclaim. He now returns to FILMeX competition with his first new film since The Dork, the Girl and the Douchebag (2015).
And once again, Okuda plays one of the characters — an employee at a popular Chinese restaurant who gets involved with a female coworker’s son who is being bullied in high school. But there are other characters, parallel storylines and, as always with an Okuda film, short, sharp violence and related comedy. If you enjoyed his earlier work, you’ll be happy to see him back.
Special Screenings
The World of You
Japan / 2021 / 89 min
Director: Akihiko Shiota
After a very productive early career (1999-2007), Akihiko Shiota has gradually slowed his output, releasing just two films in the past 5 years, one of them, Wet Woman in the Wind (2016), part of the Nikkatsu Roman Porno Reboot project. In 2019, his Farewell Song earned mild interest for its two stars, Mugi Kadowaki and Nana Komatsu, who form an indie singing duo, travel around to gigs, suddenly get popular, and decide to disband.
His new one is focused on an even younger set of musicians, two high school girls from different social classes who decide to form a band. One of them has a fatal illness, the other is self-destructive but has a beautiful voice, and the director wrote the script with actresses Yuzumi Shintani and Marin Hidaka in mind, so their performances fit like a glove.
Made in Japan
This new 4-film section features Kenji Hamauchi’s Dawning on Us, the omnibus effort Made in Yamato, by Masanori Tominaga, Yui Kiyohara, Akira Yamamoto, Risa Takeuchi, Daisuke Miyazaki and Masakazu Kaneko, and Masakazu Kaneko’s dark fantasy Ring Wandering, starring Sho Kasamatsu and Junko Abe.
You should certainly check those out. But the one everyone’s talking about is:
Haruhara-san's Recorder
Japan / 2021 / 120 min
Director: Kyoshi Sugita
After Sugita’s film world premiered at the International Film Festival Marseille and won the Audience Award, Acting Award and the Grand Prix, overseas programmers pounced. It went from there to the venerable New York Film Festival and is likely to see widespread festival play. Before Ryosuke Hamaguchi, a film this bland looking and seemingly incident free would probably be seen only by Japanese film aficionados. Although Sugita (like Hamaguchi a Kiyoshi Kurosawa protégé) has seen two previous films play in the Tokyo International Film Festival (Listen To Light, A Song I Remember), Haruhara-san’s Recorder is a better fit with FILMeX. Ostensibly the story of a woman who is making a fresh start after the tragic death of her partner, and the friends and relatives who care enough to check up on her frequently, the film is extremely oblique.
The source material, a Japanese tanka by poet Naoko Higashi, is translated as: “Gazing on / The stamp of address unknown / The recorder / Played by Haruhara-san.” In the film, there is indeed an envelope with an “address unknown” stamp, and a recorder, but we never learn who Haruhara-san is, nor how s/he might be related to the protagonist. Still, the accretion of mundane scenes, the long takes, the unusual encounters and the casual conversations over coffee or a meal remind us of the style of other arthouse films, and encourage us to put the pieces together.
Yurakucho Asahi Hall, Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.