TOKYO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2017
TIFF Cooks up a Fete for its 30th Anniversary
Venue(s): Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills, EX Theater Roppongi, Kabukiza Theatre, Tokyo International ForumOctober 25 (Wed) - November 3 (Fri), 2017 Details: http://2017.tiff-jp.net/en/schedule/
Language: Japanese (and other languages) with English (and Japanese) subtitles
Official website: 2017.tiff-jp.net/en/schedule/
Theater website: hlo.tohotheater.jp/net/schedule/009/TNPI2000J01.do
Tariff: Tickets go on sale at 12:00 pm Saturday, Oct. 14 (Sat)!
Talk event: Many, many, many — check TIFF’s website for all the details.
Title: 東京国際映画祭2017 (TOKYO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2017)
This year marks the 30th anniversary of TIFF, and there is plenty to celebrate, from its dazzling new PR visuals to its late-night offerings to its brilliantly talented Muses of Japanese Cinema.
Several years after its spotlight began shifting toward local, as well as global, offerings, TIFF is settling into middle age (in festival years) with renewed confidence and enthusiasm.
The 30th TIFF runs from October 25 – November 3 in Roppongi, and its Japan-centric highlights are legion. Nearly all Japanese films will be screened with English subs*, and most will also include English-interpreted Q&A sessions or stage appearances with the filmmaking teams.
New Festival Director Takeo Hisamatsu, a veteran of Shochiku and Warner Bros. Japan, is helming his first TIFF and has unveiled a variety of expanded programs and collaborations. Primarily aimed at striking a better balance between commercial and arthouse films, attracting younger audiences and nurturing emerging filmmakers, they also assure that Japanese films will be screened in nearly every section of this year’s 200-plus film lineup, including TIFF’s three competition sections: International Competition, Japanese Cinema Splash (for independently produced films) and Asian Future.
In Japan Now, which highlights recent and upcoming Japanese releases, you have a chance to catch the year’s buzziest titles (last year, these were Your Name and Shin Godzilla); and in Animation Focus, you can see earlier work by a current anime giant.
At TIFF 30, the local highlights start with the Opening film, Fumihiko Sori’s Fullmetal Alchemist, the long-awaited live-action adaptation of the global manga favorite; and a special presentation of footage from Chen Kaige’s 2018 release Legend of the Demon Cat, the largest-ever Japan-China co-production.
FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST, 鋼の錬金術師
Director: Fumihiko Sori
©2017 Hiromu Arakawa/SQUARE ENIX
©2017 “FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST” Film Partners
Legend of the Demon Cat, 空海―KU-KAI―
Director: Chen Kaige
©2017 New Classics Media, Kadokawa Corporation,
Emperor Motion Pictures, Shengkai Film
The huge Special Screenings section is headlined by the Godzilla Cinema Concerts, with the original 1954 film accompanied by live orchestra; and the third-annual Special Night Event at Kabukiza (Ebizo Ichikawa will perform live before a screening of the digitally remastered classic, The Gate of Hell).
Godzilla Cinema Concerts 『ゴジラ』シネマ・コンサート
TM&©TOHO CO.,LTD.
Gate of Hell [4K Digitally Restored Version]
地獄門［4Kデジタル復元版］
Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
©KADOKAWA CORPORATION 1953
Also on tap in that section is Stephen Nomura Schible’s heralded documentary portrait of a beloved Oscar winner, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, which traces the singular musician’s journey from 1980s pop icon to leading anti-nuclear activist, as he battles cancer and returns to create a major new work.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA
Director: Stephen Nomura Schible
©2017 SKMTDOC, LLC
Acclaimed director Sabu’s Mr. Long, with Asian star Chang Chen as a gangster who hides out in Japan and rediscovers his heart, finally hits Japan after premiering at the Berlin Film Festival early this year; and Gu Suyeon (Hard Romanticker) returns from a 6-year hiatus with the comedy Miko Girl, about a shrine maiden who learns a thing or two from a 5-year-old boy.
Mr. Long Mr. Long／ミスター・ロン
Director: SABU
©2017 LiVEMAX FILM / HIGH BROW CINEMA
The two Japanese films in the main Competition are both world premieres. Zeze Takahisa returns to his pinku eiga (softcore porn) roots with The Lowlife, based on adult-film actress Sakura Manami’s novel about three women of different generations who are affected by the softcore industry. Although seemingly unlinked, their lives begin to overlap following the death of a patriarch.
The Lowlife, 最低。
Director: Takahisa Zeze, ©2017 KADOKAWA
The other Japanese title, also based on a novel by a female writer, is the deliciously off-kilter dramedy Tremble All You Want, directed by Akiko Ooku. It features a star-making turn by Mayu Matsuoka as a rambunctious young woman who’s never had a boyfriend, but suddenly finds herself torn between two... although neither are winners.
Tremble All You Want, 勝手にふるえてろ
Director: Akiko Ooku
©2017 (Tremble All You Want) Production Committee
The lineup for this year’s 9-film Japanese Cinema Splash, showcasing the best in local indie film, includes Ambiguous Places, another fantastical dramedy from Akira Ikeda, Rotterdam Grand Prizewinner for Anatomy of a Paperclip; and UK-based Hikaru Toda’s Of Love & Law, a documentary about the couple who started Japan’s first openly gay law firm but are legally powerless to raise a family of their own.
Ambiguous Places, うろんなところ
Director: Akira Ikeda
©Akira Ikeda / Happy Tent
Of Love & Law
Director: Hikaru Toda
©Nanmori Films
There is also new work from Splash returnees Hirobumi Watanabe (Poolsideman) and Eiji Uchida (Lowlife Love). Watanabe injects his trademark mix of melancholy and folly into Party ’Round the Globe, about two Beatlemaniacs traveling to Tokyo for a Paul McCartney concert; while Uchida adapts Junichiro Tanizaki’s semi-autobiographical Between Men and the Gods, about a trio trapped in a love triangle.
Party 'Round the Globe, 地球はお祭り騒ぎ
Director: Hirobumi Watanabe
©FOOLISH PIGGIES FILMS
Between Men and the Gods, 神と人との間
Director: Eiji Uchida
©Between Men and the Gods/TANIZAKI TRIBUTE
As always, thanks to the spot-on curatorial skills of programming advisor Kohei Ando, the Japan Now lineup is particularly rewarding. This year, rather than naming a Director in Focus, Ando has chosen four internationally acclaimed actresses as the Muses of Japanese Cinema — Sakura Ando, Yu Aoi, Hikari Mitsushima and Aoi Miyazaki — and will screen some of their career-defining work, as well as titles by four female directors.
Photographed by Mika Ninagawa
The unfortunately named but timely Dear Etranger by Yukiko Mishima features international star Tadanobu Asano as a doting family man getting pushback from one of his second wife’s daughters; Naomi Kawase’s Palm d’Or nominee Radiance features Jim Jarmusch favorite Masatoshi Nagase; Hirokazu Kore-eda’s hit thriller The Third Murder, about the nature of truth, features Koji Yakusho in yet another sterling performance; and Kei Ishikawa’s Gukoroku - Traces of Sin, a grim exploration of class warfare cloaked as a murder mystery, stars Hikari Mitsushima and Satoshi Tsumabuki as siblings.
DEAR ETRANGER, 幼な子われらに生まれ
Director: Yukiko Mishima
©2017DEAR ETRANGER Film Partners
GUKOROKU - TRACES OF SIN, 愚行録
Director: Kei Ishikawa
© 2017 GUKOROKU - TRACES OF SIN PRODUCTION COMMITTEE.
Daihachi Yoshida’s stellar adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s A Beautiful Star — which his translator, Donald Keene, refused to translate — is about a family of aliens who try to save the Earth, with Lily Franky as the oddly endearing patriarch. Veteran arthouse maestro Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hanagatami is a deeply felt antiwar extravaganza that he’d been wanting to make for 40 years.
A BEAUTIFUL STAR, 美しい星
Director: Yoshida Daihachi
©2017 A BEAUTIFUL STAR FILM PARTNERS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
HANAGATAMI, 花筐／HANAGATAMI
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
©唐津映画製作委員会/PSC 2017
The lone anime work in Japan Now is Masaaki Yuasa’s cult film The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, an endlessly inventive coming-of-age story set in Kyoto, featuring a loser who’s in love with his black-haired classmate. “You can think of Night is Short as a kind of modern Midsummer Night’s Dream, only with fewer donkeys and more booze,” says one critic. Says another: “It features lots of walking and talking and drinking, and occasional screechy rock interludes. Like a Richard Linklater movie, in other words. Only less fun.”
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, 夜は短し歩けよ乙女
Director: Masaaki Yuasa
©森見登美彦·KADOKAWA/ナカメの会
The eagerly anticipated career retrospective The World of Keiichi Hara will showcase not only the director’s acclaimed feature anime (Miss Hokusai, Colorful, Summer Days with Coo) and his live-action feature Dawn of a Filmmaker: The Keisuke Kinoshita Story, but also provide a rare opportunity to see Hara’s early TV work, including memorable episodes of Mami the Psychic. There are also two highly hyped Crayon Shin-chan features, including the masterpiece The Adult Empire Strikes Back. And after teasing his current project at a September press conference, where he wore a t-shirt with the silhouette of an unknown character, he’s sure to divulge more details during his TIFF appearances.
Keiichi Hara at TIFF press conference ©Koichi Mori
TIFF has oodles of subsections and there are also screenings of the winners of this year’s Pia Film Festival and Skip City International D-Cinema Festival. If you missed the latter, 3ft Ball & Souls by Yoshio Kato, here’s your opportunity to see why it’s been such a crowd-pleaser on the overseas festival circuit. A taut comedy-thriller with just four characters and essentially one set, it takes place in a nondescript warehouse, where a group of strangers gathers to commit suicide via a giant, spherical firework. But when it explodes — as it does repeatedly over the next 90 minutes — the characters find themselves back where they started…
3ft Ball & Souls, 三尺魂
Director: Yoshio Kato
©3ft Ball & Souls 2017
* There are several titles in the TIFF Classics section that are apparently not subtitled; nor are the Japanese films playing in the Open-Air Cinema Arena 30. The all-night Midnight Film Screenings — featuring 10 short films by up-and-coming Japanese directors — are also not subbed. Check the TIFF website for further info.
Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills & Roppongi EX Theater
Kabukiza Theatre
This year marks the 30th anniversary of TIFF, and there is plenty to celebrate, from its dazzling new PR visuals to its late-night offerings to its brilliantly talented Muses of Japanese Cinema.
Several years after its spotlight began shifting toward local, as well as global, offerings, TIFF is settling into middle age (in festival years) with renewed confidence and enthusiasm.
The 30th TIFF runs from October 25 – November 3 in Roppongi, and its Japan-centric highlights are legion. Nearly all Japanese films will be screened with English subs*, and most will also include English-interpreted Q&A sessions or stage appearances with the filmmaking teams.
New Festival Director Takeo Hisamatsu, a veteran of Shochiku and Warner Bros. Japan, is helming his first TIFF and has unveiled a variety of expanded programs and collaborations. Primarily aimed at striking a better balance between commercial and arthouse films, attracting younger audiences and nurturing emerging filmmakers, they also assure that Japanese films will be screened in nearly every section of this year’s 200-plus film lineup, including TIFF’s three competition sections: International Competition, Japanese Cinema Splash (for independently produced films) and Asian Future.
In Japan Now, which highlights recent and upcoming Japanese releases, you have a chance to catch the year’s buzziest titles (last year, these were Your Name and Shin Godzilla); and in Animation Focus, you can see earlier work by a current anime giant.
At TIFF 30, the local highlights start with the Opening film, Fumihiko Sori’s Fullmetal Alchemist, the long-awaited live-action adaptation of the global manga favorite; and a special presentation of footage from Chen Kaige’s 2018 release Legend of the Demon Cat, the largest-ever Japan-China co-production.
FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST, 鋼の錬金術師
Director: Fumihiko Sori
©2017 Hiromu Arakawa/SQUARE ENIX
©2017 “FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST” Film Partners
Legend of the Demon Cat, 空海―KU-KAI―
Director: Chen Kaige
©2017 New Classics Media, Kadokawa Corporation,
Emperor Motion Pictures, Shengkai Film
The huge Special Screenings section is headlined by the Godzilla Cinema Concerts, with the original 1954 film accompanied by live orchestra; and the third-annual Special Night Event at Kabukiza (Ebizo Ichikawa will perform live before a screening of the digitally remastered classic, The Gate of Hell).
Godzilla Cinema Concerts 『ゴジラ』シネマ・コンサート
TM&©TOHO CO.,LTD.
Gate of Hell [4K Digitally Restored Version]
地獄門［4Kデジタル復元版］
Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
©KADOKAWA CORPORATION 1953
Also on tap in that section is Stephen Nomura Schible’s heralded documentary portrait of a beloved Oscar winner, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, which traces the singular musician’s journey from 1980s pop icon to leading anti-nuclear activist, as he battles cancer and returns to create a major new work.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA
Director: Stephen Nomura Schible
©2017 SKMTDOC, LLC
Acclaimed director Sabu’s Mr. Long, with Asian star Chang Chen as a gangster who hides out in Japan and rediscovers his heart, finally hits Japan after premiering at the Berlin Film Festival early this year; and Gu Suyeon (Hard Romanticker) returns from a 6-year hiatus with the comedy Miko Girl, about a shrine maiden who learns a thing or two from a 5-year-old boy.
Mr. Long Mr. Long／ミスター・ロン
Director: SABU
©2017 LiVEMAX FILM / HIGH BROW CINEMA
The two Japanese films in the main Competition are both world premieres. Zeze Takahisa returns to his pinku eiga (softcore porn) roots with The Lowlife, based on adult-film actress Sakura Manami’s novel about three women of different generations who are affected by the softcore industry. Although seemingly unlinked, their lives begin to overlap following the death of a patriarch.
The Lowlife, 最低。
Director: Takahisa Zeze, ©2017 KADOKAWA
The other Japanese title, also based on a novel by a female writer, is the deliciously off-kilter dramedy Tremble All You Want, directed by Akiko Ooku. It features a star-making turn by Mayu Matsuoka as a rambunctious young woman who’s never had a boyfriend, but suddenly finds herself torn between two... although neither are winners.
Tremble All You Want, 勝手にふるえてろ
Director: Akiko Ooku
©2017 (Tremble All You Want) Production Committee
The lineup for this year’s 9-film Japanese Cinema Splash, showcasing the best in local indie film, includes Ambiguous Places, another fantastical dramedy from Akira Ikeda, Rotterdam Grand Prizewinner for Anatomy of a Paperclip; and UK-based Hikaru Toda’s Of Love & Law, a documentary about the couple who started Japan’s first openly gay law firm but are legally powerless to raise a family of their own.
Ambiguous Places, うろんなところ
Director: Akira Ikeda
©Akira Ikeda / Happy Tent
Of Love & Law
Director: Hikaru Toda
©Nanmori Films
There is also new work from Splash returnees Hirobumi Watanabe (Poolsideman) and Eiji Uchida (Lowlife Love). Watanabe injects his trademark mix of melancholy and folly into Party ’Round the Globe, about two Beatlemaniacs traveling to Tokyo for a Paul McCartney concert; while Uchida adapts Junichiro Tanizaki’s semi-autobiographical Between Men and the Gods, about a trio trapped in a love triangle.
Party 'Round the Globe, 地球はお祭り騒ぎ
Director: Hirobumi Watanabe
©FOOLISH PIGGIES FILMS
Between Men and the Gods, 神と人との間
Director: Eiji Uchida
©Between Men and the Gods/TANIZAKI TRIBUTE
As always, thanks to the spot-on curatorial skills of programming advisor Kohei Ando, the Japan Now lineup is particularly rewarding. This year, rather than naming a Director in Focus, Ando has chosen four internationally acclaimed actresses as the Muses of Japanese Cinema — Sakura Ando, Yu Aoi, Hikari Mitsushima and Aoi Miyazaki — and will screen some of their career-defining work, as well as titles by four female directors.
Photographed by Mika Ninagawa
The unfortunately named but timely Dear Etranger by Yukiko Mishima features international star Tadanobu Asano as a doting family man getting pushback from one of his second wife’s daughters; Naomi Kawase’s Palm d’Or nominee Radiance features Jim Jarmusch favorite Masatoshi Nagase; Hirokazu Kore-eda’s hit thriller The Third Murder, about the nature of truth, features Koji Yakusho in yet another sterling performance; and Kei Ishikawa’s Gukoroku - Traces of Sin, a grim exploration of class warfare cloaked as a murder mystery, stars Hikari Mitsushima and Satoshi Tsumabuki as siblings.
DEAR ETRANGER, 幼な子われらに生まれ
Director: Yukiko Mishima
©2017DEAR ETRANGER Film Partners
GUKOROKU - TRACES OF SIN, 愚行録
Director: Kei Ishikawa
© 2017 GUKOROKU - TRACES OF SIN PRODUCTION COMMITTEE.
Daihachi Yoshida’s stellar adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s A Beautiful Star — which his translator, Donald Keene, refused to translate — is about a family of aliens who try to save the Earth, with Lily Franky as the oddly endearing patriarch. Veteran arthouse maestro Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hanagatami is a deeply felt antiwar extravaganza that he’d been wanting to make for 40 years.
A BEAUTIFUL STAR, 美しい星
Director: Yoshida Daihachi
©2017 A BEAUTIFUL STAR FILM PARTNERS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
HANAGATAMI, 花筐／HANAGATAMI
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
©唐津映画製作委員会/PSC 2017
The lone anime work in Japan Now is Masaaki Yuasa’s cult film The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, an endlessly inventive coming-of-age story set in Kyoto, featuring a loser who’s in love with his black-haired classmate. “You can think of Night is Short as a kind of modern Midsummer Night’s Dream, only with fewer donkeys and more booze,” says one critic. Says another: “It features lots of walking and talking and drinking, and occasional screechy rock interludes. Like a Richard Linklater movie, in other words. Only less fun.”
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, 夜は短し歩けよ乙女
Director: Masaaki Yuasa
©森見登美彦·KADOKAWA/ナカメの会
The eagerly anticipated career retrospective The World of Keiichi Hara will showcase not only the director’s acclaimed feature anime (Miss Hokusai, Colorful, Summer Days with Coo) and his live-action feature Dawn of a Filmmaker: The Keisuke Kinoshita Story, but also provide a rare opportunity to see Hara’s early TV work, including memorable episodes of Mami the Psychic. There are also two highly hyped Crayon Shin-chan features, including the masterpiece The Adult Empire Strikes Back. And after teasing his current project at a September press conference, where he wore a t-shirt with the silhouette of an unknown character, he’s sure to divulge more details during his TIFF appearances.
Keiichi Hara at TIFF press conference ©Koichi Mori
TIFF has oodles of subsections and there are also screenings of the winners of this year’s Pia Film Festival and Skip City International D-Cinema Festival. If you missed the latter, 3ft Ball & Souls by Yoshio Kato, here’s your opportunity to see why it’s been such a crowd-pleaser on the overseas festival circuit. A taut comedy-thriller with just four characters and essentially one set, it takes place in a nondescript warehouse, where a group of strangers gathers to commit suicide via a giant, spherical firework. But when it explodes — as it does repeatedly over the next 90 minutes — the characters find themselves back where they started…
3ft Ball & Souls, 三尺魂
Director: Yoshio Kato
©3ft Ball & Souls 2017
* There are several titles in the TIFF Classics section that are apparently not subtitled; nor are the Japanese films playing in the Open-Air Cinema Arena 30. The all-night Midnight Film Screenings — featuring 10 short films by up-and-coming Japanese directors — are also not subbed. Check the TIFF website for further info.
Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills & Roppongi EX Theater
Kabukiza Theatre
Please be sure to check with the theater before going.