TOKYO FILMeX INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2017
FILMeX Spotlights Unique Asian Titles
Venue(s): Yurakucho Asahi Hall, Toho Cinemas Nichigeki 1, 3Nov. 18 to 26, 2017
Language: Three Japanese films are in Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: filmex.net/2017en/
Theater website: filmex.net/2017en/map
Tariff: General: ￥1,800, Under 25 years old: ￥1,300. Go to http://filmex.net/2017en/ticket
Advance tickets: ¥1,000 or ¥1,300 online from Nov. 3, 20176.
Talk event: Visit official site for details: http://filmex.net/2017en/
Title: 東京フィルメックス ( TOKYO FILMeX INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL )
The cinephile’s delight that is Tokyo FILMeX returns for its 18th iteration with another meticulously curated lineup of international titles — including recent award winners at the Locarno, Berlin, Taipei, Shanghai and Yamagata film festivals — and Japanese legend Kazuo Hara (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On) as the chair of its Competition Jury.
From left: Shozo Ichiyama (FILMeX Program Director), Kazuo Hara (Jury Chair and filmmaker), filmmaker Sion Sono and Kanako Hayashi (FILMeX Festival Director) at the lineup announcement. ©2017 Koichi Mori
Running for nine days from November 18 – 26 at its spacious home in Yurakucho, FILMeX always features English-subtitled films that local enthusiasts would not otherwise be able to see — although they do their best to find Japanese distributors for them. Under the guidance of Festival Director Kanako Hayashi and Program Director Shozo Ichiyama, this year’s lineup of hotly anticipated titles includes three Japanese entries, one of them in competition.
That film, The Night I Swam, is a Japan-France coproduction directed by Kohei Igarashi and Damian Manivel, who met at the Locarno Film Festival in 2014 when both had work being screened there. They decided to collaborate, and their film premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival in August. It’s sure to be fascinating: set in snowy Aomori, a 6-year-old boy strays from his usual path to school and finds himself having a little adventure…
The Night I Swam, 泳ぎすぎた夜
Directors: Kohei Igarashi and Damien Manivel
Japan/France, 2017, 79 min
©2017 MLD Films / NOBO LLC / SHELLAC SUD
FILMeX favorite Sion Sono (Love Exposure, Tokyo Tribe) is back with an abbreviated version of his nine-episode Amazon Prime series Tokyo Vampire Hotel, which started running in June, and we wonder just how many massacres he has excised. Sono created, scripted and directed all but two episodes, and it’s as complexly simple as any supernatural storyline elsewhere — but a lot more propulsively violent. It was also shot partly in Transylvania/Romania, in Dracula’s actual haunts. In the titular hotel, the Corvin clan of vampires has trapped partygoers for food, and awaits the end of civilization. Manami (Ami Tomite) is the Dracula clan’s savior — a role she discovers she is destined for only after turning 22 and watching an entire izakaya filled with customers mowed down in front of her. Will she triumph over the relentless K (Kaho)? And what the heck does Yamada (Shinnosuke Mitsushima) want from her?
TOKYO VAMPIRE HOTEL, 東京ヴァンパイアホテル 映画版
Director: Sion Sono
Japan, 2017, 142 min, ©2017 NIKKATSU
The polar opposite of Sono’s raucous work, Kazuo Hara’s Sennan Asbestos Disaster, his first documentary since A Dedicated Life 23 years ago, is quiet, measured and committed to documenting the protracted court battle of the victims of a real-life tragedy. For 10 years, he chronicled the struggles of this dwindling group of former asbestos workers, who had toiled with thousands of others in some 200 factories in the Sennan district of Osaka, ignorant about the material’s dangers until they were stricken with lung cancer and other respiratory ailments. Although the government was aware of the health hazards involved in asbestos production, its priority was economic development, and they did nothing to warn those in the “Asbestos Village,” which attracted a stream of ill-educated, often Korean, workers for decades. Despite its length, this is a must-see work of nonfiction, not least for its indictment of the Japanese government, which is clearly not watching out for anybody’s best interests but its own.
Sennan Asbestos Disaster, ニッポン国VS泉南石綿村
Director: Kazuo Hara
Japan, 2017, 218 min, ©疾風プロダクション
The Opening Film is Taiwanese actor-director Sylvia Chang’s Love Education, which just closed the Busan Film Festival. The generational drama, set in contemporary China, concerns polygamy, infertility, and feudal ways, as two women fight over the body of an exhumed man. The Closing Film is the final work of FILMeX regular Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian director who died suddenly last year. 24 Frames merges photography with cinema as the director tries to capture what happens in the moments right before and after a picture is snapped.
Love Education, 相愛相親
Director: Sylvia Chang
China, 2017, 120 min, ©疾風プロダクション
24 Frames
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Iran and France, 2016, 114 min, ©疾風プロダクション
There are many other not-to-be-missed titles, including 9 competition works from Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and China; as well as Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s celebrated Samui Song, and Wang Bing’s tour de force Mrs. Fang, this year’s Golden Leopard winner at Locarno. FILMeX Classics is screening just two selections, but they’re doozies: Moana with Sound (1926), which combines Robert and Frances Flaherty’s silent documentary masterpiece with sounds their daughter Monica recorded on a 1975 trip to Samoa; and King Hu’s supernatural masterwork Legend of the Mountain (1979), the only film he says he directed as something other than an action film.
Joining Hara on the Competition Jury is Mizue Kunizane, producer and head of the Dongyu Club management agency; Korean festival programmer and producer Ellen Kim; Milena Gregor, artistic director of the Berlin Arsenal; and Hollywood Reporter critic Clarence Tsui. Together, they will bestow a Grand Prize, which is a handsome ¥1 million; and a Special Jury Prize (¥500,000).
FILMeX’s motto is “For the Bright Future of Cinema,” and it concurrently runs events like the International Critics Forum, Eiga no Jikan Plus screenings and Talents Tokyo, which brings emerging filmmakers from all over Asia to participate in mentoring and pitching sessions presided over by famous filmmakers and other industry veterans. This year, nine projects have been selected for the Next Masters Support Program, a funding initiative to support Talents Tokyo alumni.
Toho Cinemas Nichigeki 1, 3 & Yurakucho Asahi Hall
* Doors Open 20 min. before each screening
The cinephile’s delight that is Tokyo FILMeX returns for its 18th iteration with another meticulously curated lineup of international titles — including recent award winners at the Locarno, Berlin, Taipei, Shanghai and Yamagata film festivals — and Japanese legend Kazuo Hara (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On) as the chair of its Competition Jury.
From left: Shozo Ichiyama (FILMeX Program Director), Kazuo Hara (Jury Chair and filmmaker), filmmaker Sion Sono and Kanako Hayashi (FILMeX Festival Director) at the lineup announcement. ©2017 Koichi Mori
Running for nine days from November 18 – 26 at its spacious home in Yurakucho, FILMeX always features English-subtitled films that local enthusiasts would not otherwise be able to see — although they do their best to find Japanese distributors for them. Under the guidance of Festival Director Kanako Hayashi and Program Director Shozo Ichiyama, this year’s lineup of hotly anticipated titles includes three Japanese entries, one of them in competition.
That film, The Night I Swam, is a Japan-France coproduction directed by Kohei Igarashi and Damian Manivel, who met at the Locarno Film Festival in 2014 when both had work being screened there. They decided to collaborate, and their film premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival in August. It’s sure to be fascinating: set in snowy Aomori, a 6-year-old boy strays from his usual path to school and finds himself having a little adventure…
The Night I Swam, 泳ぎすぎた夜
Directors: Kohei Igarashi and Damien Manivel
Japan/France, 2017, 79 min
©2017 MLD Films / NOBO LLC / SHELLAC SUD
FILMeX favorite Sion Sono (Love Exposure, Tokyo Tribe) is back with an abbreviated version of his nine-episode Amazon Prime series Tokyo Vampire Hotel, which started running in June, and we wonder just how many massacres he has excised. Sono created, scripted and directed all but two episodes, and it’s as complexly simple as any supernatural storyline elsewhere — but a lot more propulsively violent. It was also shot partly in Transylvania/Romania, in Dracula’s actual haunts. In the titular hotel, the Corvin clan of vampires has trapped partygoers for food, and awaits the end of civilization. Manami (Ami Tomite) is the Dracula clan’s savior — a role she discovers she is destined for only after turning 22 and watching an entire izakaya filled with customers mowed down in front of her. Will she triumph over the relentless K (Kaho)? And what the heck does Yamada (Shinnosuke Mitsushima) want from her?
TOKYO VAMPIRE HOTEL, 東京ヴァンパイアホテル 映画版
Director: Sion Sono
Japan, 2017, 142 min, ©2017 NIKKATSU
The polar opposite of Sono’s raucous work, Kazuo Hara’s Sennan Asbestos Disaster, his first documentary since A Dedicated Life 23 years ago, is quiet, measured and committed to documenting the protracted court battle of the victims of a real-life tragedy. For 10 years, he chronicled the struggles of this dwindling group of former asbestos workers, who had toiled with thousands of others in some 200 factories in the Sennan district of Osaka, ignorant about the material’s dangers until they were stricken with lung cancer and other respiratory ailments. Although the government was aware of the health hazards involved in asbestos production, its priority was economic development, and they did nothing to warn those in the “Asbestos Village,” which attracted a stream of ill-educated, often Korean, workers for decades. Despite its length, this is a must-see work of nonfiction, not least for its indictment of the Japanese government, which is clearly not watching out for anybody’s best interests but its own.
Sennan Asbestos Disaster, ニッポン国VS泉南石綿村
Director: Kazuo Hara
Japan, 2017, 218 min, ©疾風プロダクション
The Opening Film is Taiwanese actor-director Sylvia Chang’s Love Education, which just closed the Busan Film Festival. The generational drama, set in contemporary China, concerns polygamy, infertility, and feudal ways, as two women fight over the body of an exhumed man. The Closing Film is the final work of FILMeX regular Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian director who died suddenly last year. 24 Frames merges photography with cinema as the director tries to capture what happens in the moments right before and after a picture is snapped.
Love Education, 相愛相親
Director: Sylvia Chang
China, 2017, 120 min, ©疾風プロダクション
24 Frames
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Iran and France, 2016, 114 min, ©疾風プロダクション
There are many other not-to-be-missed titles, including 9 competition works from Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and China; as well as Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s celebrated Samui Song, and Wang Bing’s tour de force Mrs. Fang, this year’s Golden Leopard winner at Locarno. FILMeX Classics is screening just two selections, but they’re doozies: Moana with Sound (1926), which combines Robert and Frances Flaherty’s silent documentary masterpiece with sounds their daughter Monica recorded on a 1975 trip to Samoa; and King Hu’s supernatural masterwork Legend of the Mountain (1979), the only film he says he directed as something other than an action film.
Joining Hara on the Competition Jury is Mizue Kunizane, producer and head of the Dongyu Club management agency; Korean festival programmer and producer Ellen Kim; Milena Gregor, artistic director of the Berlin Arsenal; and Hollywood Reporter critic Clarence Tsui. Together, they will bestow a Grand Prize, which is a handsome ¥1 million; and a Special Jury Prize (¥500,000).
FILMeX’s motto is “For the Bright Future of Cinema,” and it concurrently runs events like the International Critics Forum, Eiga no Jikan Plus screenings and Talents Tokyo, which brings emerging filmmakers from all over Asia to participate in mentoring and pitching sessions presided over by famous filmmakers and other industry veterans. This year, nine projects have been selected for the Next Masters Support Program, a funding initiative to support Talents Tokyo alumni.
Toho Cinemas Nichigeki 1, 3 & Yurakucho Asahi Hall
* Doors Open 20 min. before each screening
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.