Jasper Sharp » James Iha

Kakera – A Piece of Our Life up for UK Theatrical release in April

Jasper — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:36:21 +0000

Hikari Mitushima in Momoko Ando's Kakera - A Piece of Our Life

Some rather joyous festive season news courtesy of Third Window Films. The company has just announced that is has acquired UK theatrical and DVD rights for Momoko Ando’s touching debut, Kakera – A Piece of Our Life. As has been mentioned on these pages several times, the film played to great aplomb at this year’s Raindance Film Festival back in November, with Momoko in attendance for two sold-out screenings along with former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, who contributed the film’s score. It was greeted with a similarly enthusiastic reception at Stockholm Film Festival and Kinotayo in Paris, where Momoko was awarded the ‘Prix Nikon de la Plus Belle Image.’ The film opens in London on April 2^nd 2010, coinciding with the Japanese release, although there will be a premiere in London the week before this, which I’m rather hoping that Momoko Ando will be over for.

This is probably as good a time as any to correct a piece of misinformation that somehow crept on to the Raindance website and has found itself replicated on the Internet Movie Database, but Kakera was directed and WRITTEN by Momoko Ando – the credit for Yuko Shiomaki is incorrect, so I hope this gets changed on the IMDB sometime soon. Momoko is the daughter of the famous actor-director Eiji Okuda, and sister of Sakura Ando, one of the most exciting new actresses to emerge from Japan in recent years. Sakura can be seen in Yuki Tanada’s Ain’t No Tomorrows, but also in Love Exposure, which Third Window put out theatrically a month or so ago to an overwhelmingly positive critical response. Love Exposure and Kakera also share the same actress, Hikari Mitsushima.

Still on the subject of Love Exposure, other news from Third Window is that this films DVD release has been put back a fortnight to January 25^th, although it is still up for Amazon pre-order.

Momoko Ando interview on Electric Sheep website

Jasper — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:29:51 +0000

Momoko Ando in London

It’s only been about a month, but it already feels so long since Raindance that I was going to hold back for further news about festival guest and juror Momoko Ando’s debut feature Kakera – A Piece of Our Lives. For those who weren’t there for the screenings in London, I can promise there will be more postings here about it sometime in the near future, including an interview at some point on Midnight Eye, into which I’ll integrate some of the comments from the q&a with Momoko and ex-Smashing Pumpkin James Iha during their trip to the festival. I know Momoko Ando herself is heading off to Sweden to present her film as part of the Asian Images section at Stockholm International Film Festival, held 18–29 November, and to Paris for the fourth Kinatayo festival of contemporary Japanese film, held during the same period. No doubt there’ll be more screenings at other festivals over the next year too, and UK audiences should also be getting another chance to see it before too long.

To whet your appetites, I wanted to draw your attention to an interview with Momoko by Eleanor McKeown of Electric Sheep, the first of several conducted at Raindance that will appear on the magazine’s website over the next month or so. Japanese readers might also be interested in checking out Momoko’s own account of her trip to London on her blog.

Lala Pipo, playing at the ICA, London from November 13th.

Momoko Ando’s sister, the actress Sakura Ando also has a new film out in Japan sometime next year, Kenta to Jun to Kayo-chan no Kuni (trans. Kenta, Jun and Kayo’s Country) – the website and trailer are now online. Sakura, if you haven’t cottoned on by now from my various postings, can be seen right now on London screens in Sion Sono’s Love Exposure, putting in a sterling performance as the cult leader Koike, with the film promising to pop up at various future junctures in the UK over the next few months, including screenings at The Cube in Bristol and the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness according to the website of UK distributor Third Window Films. And while I’m on the subject of Third Window Films, their next release, Lala Pipo – A Lot of People is also out very soon, opening at the ICA on November 13th. This film was also part of my Japanese selection at this year’s Raindance, all of which brings us nicely full circle…

Japan Times article online: Women who love to shoot: A rising tide of women film directors in Japan gets festival treatment

Jasper — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:51:34 +0000

Sachi Hamano's Lily Festival

My article on the new wave of Japanese women filmmakers is now online on the Japan Times website, just in time to tie in with my Raindance programme, as is my interview with Atsuko Ohno, organiser of Peaches festival, from which we’re screening 3 films. Thankfully, someone at the paper came up with a decent title for the piece, because I’d been racking my brains all year, not just for this article, but for a general angle for the Raindance focus as well. I mean, how do you sell this idea? You either go the Orientalist route, say, something like “Cameras and Kimonos”, “The Chrysanthemum and the Camera”,”Not Just Cherry Blossoms” or something similarly banal, or take the condescendingly sexist approach – “Japanese Sisters are Doing it For Themselves”, “Girls in Film” … you catch my drift.

After all, should we be really surprised that women have been the guiding hand behind some of the most interesting Japanese films of the past few years? Is it really different from the situation here in the UK? I mean, I was looking through this year’s London Film Festival line-up this year, and there seemed to be a fair few woman directors listed there. Are films by women so different from those by men?

Well, these are all discussion points of course, but a couple of facts remain. Firstly, I don’t think I could have put together a 6-slot focus on Japanese women directors quite so easily, say, ten years ago. Secondly, I gave a talk about this very subject at the Japan Foundation UK last summer, and someone came up to me afterwards and said that when she told her friend she was off to a lecture on Japanese women directors, her friend said “ That will be a cosy ten minutes then” – it seems a lot of people, at least in this country, have assumptions about the roles of and opportunities for women in Japanese society that a more than cursory look at the facts would overturn. Thirdly, I should point out that it wasn’t really particularly hard to find enough films for it this year. I went through the usual procedures of drawing up a shortlist of the best titles of the past year, and half of the directors happened to be women, so it was just a case of adding some older names to the mix, of women who’ve been in the industry long enough to remember the days when their gender was an issue, such as Sachi Hamano and Naomi Kawase, and the programme pretty much formed itself.

The fact is though, this section could have been much bigger – there were plenty of other suitable titles out there from the last year, like Tsuki Inoue’s Autumn Adagio, covered recently by Tom on Midnight Eye, Satoko Yokoyama’s Bare Essence of Life, playing Vancouver and London film festivals very soon (I personally didn’t like it, but I know it has its fans), or Shimako Sato’s recent cult fantasy K20 Legend of the Mask, which certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of a “woman’s picture”. It would also have been nice to delve back in time and add some historical landmarks, like Kinuyo Tanaka’s films, which have hardly been shown at all in recent years, although locating prints and negotiating affordable screening fees was something of an issue here.

Its obvious though, that if one wanted to do a fuller retrospective on Japanese women filmmakers, there’s no shortage of material to draw upon. It’s probably the right time to do it too, because it seems obvious to me that if recent years are anything to go by, future Japanese film programmes will feature an equal mix of male and female directors without any such need for making an issue about it.

Anyway, as the fest draws ever nearer, I should mention that we’ll have a healthy showing of guests to accompany this Japanese section; Yumiko Beppu, director of Csikspost from the Peaches selection has said she’ll be over, as will Sachi Hamano, whom I’ve written lots about in my book Behind the Pink Curtain, and her scriptwriter for Lily Festival, Kuninori Yamazaki – I’m really looking forward to talking to these guys. Also Yasunobu Takahashi, director of Locked Out, and Tokachi Tsuchiya, of A Normal Life Please. But most exciting, is that we’re getting the world premiere of Kakera, and not only will director Momoko Ando be over, but the musician who scored her film too – James Iha, best known for his stellar guitar work for Smashing Pumpkins. It all promises to be quite the party.