TOKYO FILMeX 2025

For Uncompromising Filmmakers and Passionate Audiences

Venue(s): Yurakucho Asahi Hall, Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho
November 21 (Fri) – November 30 (Sun), 2025.
Language: All Japanese films are with English subtitles
Official website: filmex.jp/en/
Theater website: filmex.jp/en/map
Theater website: filmex.jp/en/schedule/
Theater website: filmex.jp/en/program/fc/
Tariff: General: ￥2,000, Under 25: ￥1,500.
Advance tickets: From November 6 (Thu), 12:00 PM. General: ￥1,700 - 1,800, Under 25: ￥1,200 - 1,500. Go to https://filmex.jp/2025/ticket2023; Human Trust Shibuya: From Nov. 1, Go to the theater site, https://ttcg.jp/human_shibuya/
Talk event: Visit official site for details: https://filmex.jp/2025en/guest

Title: 第26回 東京フィルメックス (Dai 26 Kai TOKYO FILMeX)

Tokyo FILMeX returns for its 26th edition with yet another meticulously curated lineup of auteur-driven cinema, from November 23 – December 1 at Yurakucho Asahi Hall and Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho. There is also a pre-event, Revisiting the Hong Kong New Wave, starting November 14, with rare, restored classics. Almost all the films in the main lineup will screen with English subtitles, and many filmmakers will be on hand for Q&A sessions. While Tokyo Filmgoer focuses only on the Japanese titles, as always, we encourage you to see as many other films as you can.

Competition

This year’s FILMeX Competition comprises 10 bold new films by emerging filmmakers across Asia, including several that have already scooped up prizes and/or generated significant buzz at pervious festivals.

The Competition Jury consists of Chinese director Song Fang (Memories Look at Me, The Calming), Argentine producer Matías Piñero (You Burn Me), and Swiss director Ramon Zürcher (The Girl and the Spider, The Sparrow in the Chimney), the latter of whom will also be honored with a three-film retrospective. They trio will decide on the Grand Prize (¥700,000) and the Special Jury Prize (¥300,000), to be announced on the festival’s penultimate night. There will also be an Audience Award chosen from across all sections, and a Student Jury Prize for the Competition films.

NUMB / しびれ

NUMB / しびれ
Director: Takuya Uchiyama / 内山拓也
Japan / 2025 / 118 min

Returning to his Niigata hometown, Uchiyama Takuya (Sasaki in My Mind) delivers a raw, introspective story of a boy silenced by trauma and longing for reconnection with his parents. Muted by years of emotional control from his father, the boy and his mother navigate guilt, tenderness, and unspoken love in an unflinching depiction of family fracture and reconciliation.

THE SITE / グラン・シエル

THE SITE / グラン・シエル
Director: HATA Akihiro / 畑 晃洋
France, Luxembourg / 2025 / 92 min

While this is not a Japan-produced or -set film, it merits our attention because the director, Akihiro Hata, was the first Japanese student to be accepted in the directing department of France’s prestigious La Fémis film school, and The Site is Hata’s feature-length narrative debut. The realist drama combines horror-genre elements and premiered earlier this year at the Venice Film Festival.

Set on a massive, futuristic construction site in France, the film centers on the invisible men who build our cities. The story follows Vincent (Damien Bonnard, who also starred in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s French Serpent’s Path), a worker on the night shift who exerts every effort in his job, which pits him against his colleagues, who all live in fear of being fired. Immigrant laborers have begun to disappear, and management seems to ignores this creepy reality. When they offer a promotion to Vincent, his tenuous sense of solidarity with the other workers is endangered, and gradually, in the bowels of the construction site, he must face an overwhelming truth about the cost of survival in an age of exploitation.

Made in Japan

This section, created in 2022, features two films by emerging filmmakers who have already attracted international attention at prior festivals.

Leave the Cat Alone / 猫を放つ

Leave the Cat Alone / 猫を放つ
Director: Daisuke Shigaya / 志萱大輔
Japan / 2025 / 102 min

If you like Japan’s vaunted “slow cinema” and long walks through nighttime Tokyo (but don’t look for felines — there are none), this is the film for you. The feature debut of Daisuke Shigaya, it premiered in the new Competition program at Busan International Film Festival earlier this year, and spawned many conversations about its understated, unhurried drama. The story sounds familiar—three not-yet-famous artists grapple with the gap between their youthful ideals and their current adult lives—but Shigaya’s telling is unusual.

In the film, Mori (musician Soma Fujii, who also wrote the score), a musician, is tired of trying to maintain both his artistic passion and his stagnant relationship with his wife, Maiko (Ren Taniguchi), an emerging photographer. His rage and regret are silent, but palpable. After reuniting with a former girlfriend, Asako (Yukino Murakami), with whom he takes that long walk, he’s reminded of his youthful passions and beings to ponder how to reboot his life. Shigaya refuses to ratchet up the drama on Mori’s introspection, providing perhaps his own subdued answer to midlife malaise of the millennial.

Northeastern Shorts Collection: Half-Time, Life Is Snow, Selection /
東北短編集：「ハーフタイム」「相談」「祝日」

Northeastern Shorts Collection: Half-Time, Life Is Snow, Selection /
東北短編集：「ハーフタイム」「相談」「祝日」
Director: Yaoyuan Zhang / 張 曜元
Japan, China / 2025 / 83 min

After earning a Ph.D. in Film Studies from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2024, and winning awards at Chinese festivals with several of the shorts in this “collection,” Zhang Yaoyuan combined three of his short films to portray “Northeasterners in Japan” — Chinese immigrant workers who are facing daily microaggressions from racism and other hardships.

Zhang, a Northeasterner himself — he was born in Dalian — views these people with understandable empathy, and exposes their travails with a wealth of realistic details. In an interesting choice, he has just one actor—Tsuyoshi Abe (Boys Over Flowers), who is of mixed Japanese-Chinese descent—playing the protagonist of each film.

In Half-Time, Abe is a Chinese technical intern trainee prepping for an interview in which his training location in Japan will be decided. The man is in debt and has suffered physical and mental pain, compounded by homesickness. In Life Is Snow, former factory worker Abe has a conversation with his lawyer about suing his supervisor for firing him from a bento factory. And in Selection, Abe plays a former professional soccer player from China who’s working for an unlicensed taxi service in Tokyo, and attempts to get his son into a soccer club.

As these men attempt to escape from untenable situations, Zhang highlights just how challenging multicultural coexistence can be.

Asahi Hall

Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho