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18
Oct
New Japanese film festival Zipangu Fest warms up for the main event

The first UK-wide festival devoted to Japanese Film...

Japanarchy in the UK

The first UK‐wide festival devoted to Japanese cinema November 23‐28 2010 http://zipangufest.com

Monday October 18th 2010

New Japanese film festival Zipangu Fest warms up for the main event with a string of exclusive lectures and rare archive screenings across the country

The first Zipangu Fest is delighted to announce more details for its programme of events this autumn. The festival will run from November 23th to 28th 2010 in London’s East End before touring the country. The full programme will be announced by Festival Director Jasper Sharp at the Barbican’s Japanese Halloween Shlockfest Double Bill of RoboGeisha and Big Tits Zombie 3D + Augmented City 3D on October 29th. Tickets are almost sold out for these screenings, so be sure to book right away!

To whet audience appetites, Mr Sharp will be presenting a lecture exploring the history of independent jishu eiga filmmaking in Japan, followed by an exclusive screening of Annyong Kimchee (1999). The film is Japanese‐Korean filmmaker Tetsuaki Matsue’s personal enquiry into the importance of ethnic and cultural roots and what it means to be Japanese. This event will first be held at the Coventry University East Asian Film Society (CUEAFS) at 2pm on Wednesday October 20th in Room G34 of the university’s Ellen Terry Building, and then at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at 7pm on Friday November 12th, in the Brunei Gallery lecture theatre.

Tetsuaki Matsue's Annyong Kimchee screening at CUEAFS and SOAS

Zipangu Fest is also proud to announce a special presentation at the 24th Leeds International Film Festival of Hiroshi Shimizu’s rarely‐seen early classic of independent Japanese cinema, Children of the Beehive (1948). The film relates the journey of a group of war orphans (in real life all orphans taken in and raised by the director) as they are taken under the wing of a nameless soldier and set out across a shattered, post‐ war landscape in search of a more certain future. The film will be showing first on Saturday 6 November as part of a one‐day symposium, Breaking Boundaries: Alternative Approaches to Japanese Film, organised by the University of Leeds, and then at 7pm on Monday November 8th at the Hyde Park Picture House. Tickets are £6.50/£5.00.

Zipangu Fest has also put together a special programme of Japanese underground animation in collaboration with the Encounters 16th International Film Festival in Bristol. The Ero Guro Anime Night programme, a selection of nightmarishly morbid animations from the Japanese underground, will screen at the Cube Microplex on Friday November 19th at 8pm. Zipangu Fest festival director Mr Sharp and Man‐ Eater Mountain sound designer Takuro Kochi will be there to introduce the programme. The screenings will be followed by a Late Night Japanese Pink Double Bill of Sexy Timetrip Ninjas (1984) and Groper Train: Search for the Black Pearl (1984), two deliriously tasteless comic classics of the pink film genre directed by Yojiro Takita, now famous as the winner of the 2008 Best Foreign Film Academy Award for the drama Departures. Doors open at 11pm. The Late Night Japanese Pink Double Bill has been made possible by Pink Eiga.

Midori: The Girl in the Freakshow, screening at Bristol's Cube Microplex

Leading up to Zipangu Fest’s much‐awaited London festival dates, Zipangu Fest has worked with Close‐Up to present the Nippon Year Zero programme of 1960s Japanese experimental films on Tuesday November 23th, at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.

Zipangu Fest has confirmed the festival venues of Café 1001 in Brick Lane and the Genesis Cinema on Mile End Road. Guests can expect two full nights of entertainment from 6pm on November 24th and 25th, for the modest ticket price of £5.00 per evening. Zipangu Fest will launch into full swing for the weekend from November 26th to 28th at the Genesis Cinema in Whitechapel. Tickets will be £7.50/£5.00.

Zipangu Fest at the Genesis Cinema, Mile End Road, 26th-28th November

Following this, a selection of the Zipangu Fest festival programme will be screened at the Arnolfini in Bristol between December 16th and 19th, with further venues to be announced at a later date.

Jasper Sharp comments: “I’m really excited about these upcoming events across the country, because the goal with Zipangu Fest was always to reach out to new audiences and introduce Japanese cinema to as wide and diverse a crowd as possible. We’re really happy to be partnering up with so many respected film festivals and other organisations to this end, and I really hope this is something we will be able to expand on in the future. I also can’t wait to announce the main programme. We’ve got a really strong set of films and a host of guests already confirmed, and there’s going to be plenty more going on around the actual festival dates than just the screenings.”

For further press information please contact: michelle@zipangufest.com

Visit the Zipangu Fest website at http://zipangufest.com.

About Zipangu Fest

The first UK‐wide festival devoted to Japanese film, Zipangu Fest will introduce works new and old, previously unseen by mainstream UK film audiences, to demonstrate the many identities of Japan as depicted by some of the country’s most exciting and revered talents.

For its main event this year, Zipangu Fest will be holding around 15 screenings and other related events at venues across London’s vibrant East End. Cinema venues include the Barbican, Genesis Cinema in Whitechapel, Café 1001 in Brick Lane and the Working Men’s Club in Bethnal Green. The main body of film events will take place in London from November 23rd to 28th 2010, with regional events currently arranged in Bristol, Leeds and Coventry, and more to be confirmed.

Posted at 15:32 on 18 October 2010 Filed under news.
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20
Sep
Living Legend of Japanese Experimental Film Comes to Britain!

You might remember back in April I posted about an evening of films by the experimental filmmaker Takahiko Iimura organised by Close Up Video at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club in London, which ultimately was canceled when the volcanic eruption in Iceland saw its guest of honour stranded in Japan. Well, the screenings are back on again for this October, and the extra time has actually allowed the event to be expanded into something of a touring programme, with the director in attendance at a number of screenings across the country, in London, Leeds and Bristol.

If you’re not familiar with Iimura’s work, you can check out his website, and await the interview with the director which should be coming up on Midnight Eye sometime soon conducted by Julian Ross. Julian also had a hand in getting the screenings up to Leeds, in conjunction with the Cherry Kino exerimental filmmaking/screening group and the University of Leeds’s Centre For World Cinemas-Mixed Cinema Network, where I gave a talk on the Japanese New Wave back in February of this year. Not only that, but Julian is also the driving force behind the Breaking Boundaries: Alternative Approaches to Japanese Film conference I mentioned in my post a couple of months ago.

I mention all of this because not only is Zipangu Fest, the new Japanese film festival that I am programming, collaborating with Breaking Boundaries where we’ll be screening a print of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive, but Julian has also put together a programme of 1960s experimental work in collaboration with Close Up Video which will be screening at the Bethnal Green Working Man’s Club as part of Zipangu Fest on 23rd November. I’ll of course be announcing more details about this as they come, but suffice it to say for now, if you’re based in England and interested in 1960s experimental film from Japan, you’re going to be very well served this year!

Anyway, more details about the Iimura screenings below – note that the programme is different from venue to venue:

From Iimura's 'Talking Picture (The Structure of Film Viewing)', now available on DVD from the directors website

Dates in the UK:

October 5th: London, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club: Seeing/Hearing/Speaking – The Films of Takahiko Iimura + Live Performance

October 6th: London, Nowhere Lab (Workshop): no.w.here and Takahiko Iimura present: How To Make Time Visible In Film (without photography)

October 7th: London, Central St. Martins, University of Arts London

October 11th: Leeds, ICS Cinema in the University of Leeds more details on this particular screening below

October 13th: Bristol, Arnolfini: Takahiko Iimura: On Time in Film (Discussion and Screenings)

Observer-Observed: Takahiko Iimura

Here’s some more information for the Leeds event:

Cherry Kino and the CWC-MCN University of Leeds presents: Japanese Experimental Cinema: An Evening with Takahiko Iimura

Date: October 11th 2010

Time: 6:30-9pm

Venue: ICS Cinema, University of Leeds

Price: FREE

Takahiko Iimura is an experimental filmmaker, video artist and writer on experimental film who has been working with the moving image since the 1960s. His work explores the relationship between media, time and language and has strived to redefine the exhibition of cinema as a mode of performance. He has worked closely with members of the Hi-Red Centre and Fluxus, as well as Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, John Cage, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek and many others, bridging boundaries between film, art and performance. He moved to New York in 1966 and has since been a conduit of intercultural communication between Japan and America, introducing Japanese experimental cinema to the West and vice versa. He recently began self-releasing his work on DVD and continues to travel around the world to show his films.

“Although Taka was and continues to be an active part of the New York avant-garde scene, he always remained an enigmatic, mysterious presence, pursuing his own unique route through the very center of the avant-garde cinema. While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde film movement inspired him and attracted him, his Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema’s minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else.” – Jonas Mekas

“From early sixties, though Japanese, Iimura was well known as one of the first generation of the New York Underground … For many years, Japanese experimental film was Takahiko Iimura” – Malcolm Le Grice

Cherry Kino and the CWC-MCN University of Leeds have invited Takahiko Iimura to join our screening of a selection of his films, which will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker himself. Many thanks to WREAC who have helped us fund the event and the ICS for kindly offering their venue.

For more information on the event, please click here.

White Calligraphy

Films programmed for the event (16mm):

Ai (Love) (1962)

Iro (Colour) (1962-3)

Kuzu (Junk) (1962)

One Frame Duration (1977)

Cine-Dance: Anma (1963)

Ma: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-ji (1989)

Performance of White Calligraphy (2008)

Posted at 12:16 on 20 September 2010 Filed under news.
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20
Feb
Eureka to release Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods on Blu-Ray in May

Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods from Eureka

Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods from Eureka

Just back at home a few days from a 10-day break in Kenya en route to my next stop on a work/research trip to Japan, and while I should be busy unpacking my shorts, swimming trucks and suntan lotion in exchange for clothing more suitable for the icy climbs of Hokkaido where I’ll be heading on Wednesday for Yubari film festival, I just couldn’t contain myself at the news, which reached me via the Wildgrounds website, that UK label Eureka are to release Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods on Blu-Ray in May as part of their Masters of Cinema series.

Profound Desire of the Gods

Profound Desire of the Gods

Yes, it’s slightly annoying that this is only on Blu-Ray, but on a more positive side, this is the first time that I’ve felt the Blu-Ray I’ve had hooked up to the HD TV for the past 9 months has actually been necessary. Imamura’s film is a beautiful-looking work, shot in vibrant colours in verdant, tropical climes, all in expansive widescreen NikkatsuScope. This is a film I’d been waiting to see ever since I first read about it about ten years ago while researching the Imamura chapter of The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. It’s true, while I was living in Japan, I could quite easily have rented the VHS and watched it without subtitles, but from what I’d read, this film was so close to my own interests and tastes that I wanted my first encounter with it to be a little more special, which is the main reason for getting involved in the Imamura showcase at Bristol’s Arnolfini last October (see my thoughts on the retro), to actually bring a subtitled print across to the UK. Well, the film was everything I’d hoped for and more, from the bizarre opening sequence of a pig being throw into the sea as a sacrifice to be feasted upon by sharks to the coda set on the ludicrous tourist train, and caused much discussion with the other viewers at the Arnolfini after the screening finished. This is an utterly one-off work, and I am trembling in anticipation at seeing it up on a screen again. I can’t emphasize how much I love the films of Shohei Imamura. This is among the best, ranking in my books alongside Pigs and Battleships and The Ballad of Narayama. Imamura is pretty well-represented on region 1 DVD, but I just hope this Eureka release garners enough attention and excitement for further UK releases of his films. These really benefit from being seen as a large a screen in as high resolution as possible.

Profound Desires of the Gods

Profound Desires of the Gods

I do remember suggesting this title to Masters of Cinema quite a few years ago, so whether they took my advice, or were inspired by the Imamura season last year, or already had it under consideration anyway, I don’t know. I’m just ecstatic it’s imminent. Now its time to work on the next campaign to spread the word outside Japan about forgotten or unknown classics from forgotten or unknown filmmakers, and the next candidate is Susumu Hani, a director who I am quite flabbergasted that Western distributors or film curators have not picked up on yet. Following the Tomu Uchida season, Alex Jacoby and I pitched a retrospective of this figure to the British Film Institute, but didn’t get any response at all – the powers-that-be there obviously think it safer to stick with what they know, so we get Ozu and Kurosawa retrospectives again this year. Anyway, keep your eyes fixed on Midnight Eye, as you’ll find out plenty more on Hani there in the coming month or so.

In the meantime, as mentioned, I’m off to Tokyo tomorrow, and to Yubari Film Festival on Wednesday, from which I hope to post updates about the good films on offer there. I also hope to post a bit more on some other Eureka releases which I’ve not had time to write about yet, so I hope to be rather more active on this site than I have been over the past month or so.

Posted at 12:30 on 20 February 2010 Filed under news.
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