The season is the Japan Foundation’s most ambitious yet, with a total of nine films travelling to seven venues across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (but not that other place) between 10 February to 28 March 2012. This year’s title is ‘Whose Film Is It Anyway? Contemporary Japanese Auteurs’, and the films have all been selected because they are directed from original scripts, not adaptations of books or manga, or TV tie-ins. We thought it was an important theme, because when you look at the list of top-grossing Japanese films of recent years, it seems to be dominated by TV spin-offs such as the Umizaru, Boys Over Flowers and Rookies films. It seemed a particularly good time to celebrate the auteur, and also extol the virtues of originality rather than tried and tested formulas – something worth remembering given the various debates that raged a couple of weeks back vis-a-vis David Cameron’s comments outlining his ideas for the British film industry as touched upon in my previous post (although it now seems these might have been slightly misreported).

Shall We Dance? director Masayuki Suo in London and in conversation with yours truly on Thursday 9 February, to introduce his most recent film I Just Didn't Do It.

The series kicks off in London at the ICA on 11 February and will run there until 16 February – the full programme of the London screenings is given here. In order to launch the season, the Japan Foundation will be holding a special event on 9 February at their Russell Square premises, with the director Masayuki Suo in conversation, talking about his filmmaking methods to mark our screenings of his last work, I Just Didn’t Do It (Soredemo boku wa yattenai), a damning indictment of the Japanese judicial system.

I’m particularly honoured and excited to be conducting this onstage interview with one of Japan’s most internationally-acclaimed directors, because as I frequently tell anyone who asks me, it was his wonderful ballroom comedy Shall We Dance? that provided one of my early epiphanies about Japanese film, which resulted in my leaving the humdrum security of office life and heading over to Japan to study its cinema (You can read the whole story in this piece I wrote for J-Film Powwow a couple of years back. I’ve never met Suo before, but I do know I love his films, and that in this particular case, they’ve had a life-changing effect on me. It still brings a tear to my eye, this beautiful film (and this is from someone who can’t bare to be in the same room as BBC Saturday night talent show Strictly Come Dancing).

The other end of auteurism - director Katsumi Sakaguchi will be talking about his film Sleep with Roger Clarke at the Japan Foundation UK on 13 Feb.

The Japan Foundation has two guests over this year, the second being Katsumi Sakaguchi, whose gritty Sleep (Nemuri yusurika), a docudrama about prostitution and sexual dysfunction, presents an altogether more challenging aspect of ‘auteurist cinema’ than Suo’s films. Chairing what I am sure will be a fascinating discussion with the director at the Japan Foundation on Monday 13 February 2012 (from 6.30pm ) is the critic Roger Clarke, writer for The Independent and Sight & Sound among other things.

I should be there for much of the first weekend at the ICA introducing the various films, so look forward to seeing you there. As for the two events at the Japan Foundation, both are free to attend but booking is essential. To reserve a place, please email your name and the title of the event you would like to attend to event@jpf.org.uk.

Event: ‘Whose Film Is It Anyway? Contemporary Japanese Auteurs’ Japan Foundation UK Touring Programme

Venue: Institute of Contemporary Arts, then Belfast Queen’s Film Theatre, Bristol Watershed, Edinburgh Filmhouse, Glasgow Film Theatre, Nottingham Broadway and Sheffield Showroom

Kenji Uchida's A Stranger of Mine.

This year’s Japan Foundation annual touring film programme looks at narrative creativity by contemporary Japanese directors in contrast to the recent storm of adaptations, and how they express their voices through cinema. Ranging from the emerging to the established, this programme showcases directors who are not necessarily well-represented in this country, but whose works demonstrate their keen creativity.

Giants such as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu are renowned for their uniquely creative signature styles, along with more recent examples such as Takeshi Kitano and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but recent years have revealed a more mundane side to the industry, where the top-grossing titles have largely been generic spin-offs of TV shows or adaptations of other sources such as popular manga and novels unpublished outside Japan, in order to generate audiences based on a pre-existing associated market.

This programme is an effort to demonstrate that there are in fact still a number of Japanese directors who, rather than being swayed by ever-fickle markets and following a “safe” formulaic film model, have instead elected to pursue their own methods of expressing themselves and using film as a voice. 9 directors have been selected for this programme, including the respected Masayuki Suo and unique auteure Miwa Nishikawa.

The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme continues to go from strength to strength, returning this year with more films and more venues than ever before!

Programme advice from Jasper Sharp

Films In Season:

A Stranger of Mine (Kenji Uchida, 2005)

About Her Brother (Yoji Yamada, 2010)

All Around Us (Ryosuke Hashiguchi, 2008)

Bad Company (Tomoyuki Furumaya, 2001)

Dear Doctor (Miwa Nishikawa, 2009)

Heart Beating In The Dark (Shinichi Nagasaki, 2005)

I Just Didn’t Do It (Masayuki Suo, 2007)

Sleep (Katsumi Sakaguchi, 2011)

The Dark Harbour (Takatsugu Naito, 2008)

Guests from Japan:

Q&A session with director Masayuki Suo (I Just Didn’t Do It)

ICA Screenings: 11th February (3:30pm) ; 12th February (4:00pm)

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Q&A session with director Katsumi Sakaguchi (Sleep)

ICA Screening: 16th February & Showroom Screening: 17th February

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Rare screening of Anna May Wong film Song (1928) in London this Saturday

Well, I won’t be in London as it happens, but even if I were on the demo, I think i’d probably duck off a bit early to the new(ish) Cinema Museum, situated midway between Elephant & Castle and Kennington Tube stations on where at 19.30 there will be a Special Event dedicated to Hollywood’s first non-Caucasian screen siren, the Asian-American actress Anna May Wong. The evening will kick off with Elaine Mae Woo’s biographical documentary Anna May Wong – Frosted Yellow Willows: Her Life, Times and Legend (2007), followed by a Q&A with its director. I caught this documentary a couple of years ago when it played at the BFI, and it’s a pretty good introduction to its subject, though obviously lacks something of the depth of detail of the best book on the subject, Graham Russell Hodges’ Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend. This is followed by a very rare screening of Richard Eichberg’s Song (Schmutziges Geld, 1928), which I’m positively gutted I am missing: it’s one a handful of brooding, atmospheric silent films she made in Europe during her Hollywood career lull in the late 1920s, which also include the same director’s haunting Pavement Butterfly (Großstadtschmetterling, 1929) and E.A. Dupont’s altogether more vibrant celebration of 1920s London nightlife, Piccadilly (1929), arguably her best known star-turn and the only one of these films currently out there on DVD – I love this particular film, which ranks among the best British silents, but it’s a shame that screenings of the other two are so rare. Incidentally, I’ve yet to check out the Cinema Museum, but hope to visit very soon. It’s not a place I’ve heard anything about yet, so I’m very curious to what’s there, and why, with the BFI just down the road, there should even be a need for it (I would suspect the answer to this rhetorical question might not reflect too well on the BFI.)

Koji Yakusho in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's brilliant psychological chiller, Cure (1997)

Well, Japan’s recent tragedy has been well covered on this site, and one would think our attention to all things Japanese would be better oriented towards helping its victims. However, as Pia Film Festival director Keiko Araki writes in a newsletter I received from the festival this morning “The recovery of the Tohoku area, or rather, of Japan itself will still probably take a very long time. But Pia Film Festival will continue to do whatever it can by having faith in the power of film and in the power of the nameless aspiring young filmmakers everywhere. Now, more than ever before, we ask that you keep your eyes on Japanese films.” So, people of Sheffield, I draw your attention to the Japan Foundation’s Back to the Future season, details of which are posted on the events section of this website and which this weekend winds up its tour of the UK in the city’s Showroom Cinema starting with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterful Cure this evening.

Nostalgic pleasures with The Dark Crystal, screening in 70mm this weekend at Bradford's Widescreen Weekend

While I’m actually in Sheffield at this precise moment, I regrettably won’t be around for the season, as at the crack of dawn tomorrow, I’ll be heading off to Bradford’s National Media Museum for Widescreen Weekend 2011, details of which (+links) are posted on my events page. High-points at present look set to include the complete 3-strip Cinerama presentation of How the West Was Won, a 70mm screening of The Dark Crystal, and…. Suspiria! Oh, and there’s Dersu Uzala (which I’ll be introducing), Bridge On the River Kwai, Operation Crossbow, and much, much more, all screening on probably the best screen in the UK! I hope to post fairly regularly on the festival here on this website over the course of the weekend, so if you’re not out sunning yourself, please take a look (or if you are sunning yourself, just check in on your iPhone).

More nostalgia with Dario Argento's Suspiria at Widescreen Weekend

Now in its 8th year, the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme focuses on the marked resurgence of Japanese cinema from the mid 1990s onwards. With a series of works from seven key directors who have carved a new path for the future and contributed to the recent success of Japanese cinema around the world, the 2011 line-up provides UK audiences with an insight into a pivotal period which changed the landscape of Japanese cinema and provided a once great industry with a new lease of life.

The titles in this year’s line-up are among the finest examples from key Japanese directors of this period, popular both at home and abroad, such as Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, alongside directors like Isao Yukisada and Isshin Inudo who have been highly successful within the domestic market in Japan but are less recognised overseas. Also included are representatives from a younger generation of directors including Yuya Ishii who is part of a new stream of talent to watch out for in the future.

As well as inspiring the beginnings of a new era of Japanese cinema, these directors all continue to work, and remain a part of the future of Japanese cinema. Though the selected works may be less well-known in the UK, they are all key works in the development of their respective director’s career, they also serve to illustrate the development of contemporary Japanese cinema and help to exhibit a great breadth of creativity.

The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme is organised by the Japan Foundation with advice from Jasper Sharp.

Also at BELFAST, BRISTOL, EDINBURGH, NOTTINGHAM and SHEFFIELD
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I’m more excited about this year’s than I’ve been in some time because the theme is not so constraining as it has been in previous years. Entitled Back to the Future: Japanese Cinema Since the Mid-90s, what we’ve aimed to do this time round is simply showcase some of the most important filmmakers of the past 20 years, the major names who have emerged after the time when everyone was pronouncing Japanese cinema more or less dead. This was a great trip down memory lane for me, back to the time when we started off Midnight Eye over ten years ago and began championing the likes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike, who were at the time virtually unheard of outside of Japan.

Isao Yukisada's Go - ten years old this year!

The aim was to take a couple influential directors active in the early 1990s (Kurosawa and Miike), a handful who hit their stride in the early part of the new millennium (Isao Yukisada, Isshin Inudo and Nobuhiro Yamashita) and two to watch for now (Yuya Ishii and Yuki Tanada). This gave us a far broader and more varied pool of films to select from than usual, and a great chance to reintroduce the big names that got me into Japanese film in the first place.

It was important to remember that though I and other Japanese film fans might be well versed in the works of, for example, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, it is fair to assume that most of the British public probably aren’t, and so opportunities to catch Cure on the big screen are rare things indeed, and it is all the more amazing when you realise that one of the most influential and effective films in the J-Horror genre has never been released on DVD over here. Similarly, while there was a phase in the early 2000s when seemingly Miike only had to fart and it would get put out on DVD, one of the titles that got missed was also, in my opinion, one of his most impressive, The Bird People in China. And then there were brilliant titles like Isao Yukisada’s Go, which made a huge impact at the time, but never got picked for overseas distribution because companies like Tartan were swamping the market with its ‘Asia Extreme’ crap and alienating a whole generation from Japanese film. Josee, the Tiger and the Fish is a great example of this sort of thing – a film that did the festival rounds and impressed most who saw it, but it never really went anywhere in terms of DVD distribution. Inudo and Yukisada were two of the most profitable directors working in the Japanese industry during the past decade, yet they’re virtually unknown in the West.

Almost unbelievable to think that Kiyoshi Kurosawa's masterful Cure never got a UK DVD release

So without the constraints of the themes of the previous years (the family in Japanese film, women in Japanese film etc), this years’ programme more simply gave us a chance just to select good films, entertaining crowd-pleasers that represent the very best of the past twenty year that haven’t been shown widely in the UK before. Even then, there were a few surprises about what was actually available. Its funny, but you think that films that the late-90s and or early-2000s were fairly recent in terms of the broad sweep of cinema history, but I was amazed by the number of titles we looked at where the only subtitled prints were too poor condition to screen or the original production company had gone bankrupt and the current rightsholders were unknown. There are a lot of pretty major titles from the past decade will probably never see light of a projector again. Shocking.

Bird People of China - still one of Miike's finest, IMHO

The season kicks off at the ICA on 4 February and runs for 9 days before heading to a number of other cities: Belfast, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Bristol and Sheffield.

Before its opening, I’ll be giving an introduction to the season on 27 January from 6.30pm at the Japan Foundation, so please come along. Its free, although you need to inform them you are coming an advance, and it will be a great chance to talk with me and others about Japanese cinema and this year’s programme – and you get a free glass of wine at the end (maybe two or three if you’re quick!)

Details of my talk can be found on the Japan Foundation website here.

Details of the season are here, but I’m also pasting them below (you’ll note in my last post I mentioned “wrestling with WordPress”  – apologies for the formatting below, but it is simply not doing what I am asking it, damn it!) :

Anyone remember this one? A rare chance to catch Isshin Inudo's touching 2003 film Josee, the Tiger and the Fish on the big screen

From the Japan Foundation Website

This year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme focuses on the marked resurgence of Japanese cinema from the mid 1990s onwards. Including established names such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa as well as up-and-coming talent Yuya Ishii, the featured directors have carved a new path for the future and contributed to the recent success of Japanese cinema around the world. Showcasing a great breadth of creativity, the 2011 line-up offers UK audiences an insight into a pivotal period which changed the landscape of Japanese cinema and provided the industry with a new lease of life.

2011 Film line-up:

Linda Linda Linda

Dir: Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan 2005 (114min, 35mm, subtitles)

Cure

Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan 1997 (115min, 35mm, subtitles)

Go

Dir: Isao Yukisada, Japan 2001 (122min, 35mm, subtitles)

Sawako Decides (Kawano Sokokara Konnichiwa)

Dir:Yuya Ishii, Japan 2009 (112min, 35mm,subtitles)

Josee, the Tiger and the Fish (Joze To Tora To Sakana Tachi)

Dir: Isshin Inudo, Japan 2003 (116min, 35mm, subtitles)

One Million Yen Girl (Hyakumanen To Nigamushi Onna)

Dir: Yuki Tanada, Japan 2008 (121min, 35mm, subtitles)

The Bird People in China (Chugoku No Chojin)

Dir: Takashi Miike, Japan 1998 (102min, 35mm subtitles)

Date: 4 February 2011 – 28 March 2011

Touring venues:

4 – 13 February ICA Cinema, London

21 – 24 February Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast

4 – 10 March Filmhouse, Edinburgh

11 – 16 March Broadway, Nottingham

18 – 20 March Arnolfini, Bristol

22 – 28 March Showroom Workstation, Sheffield

Jun Ichikawa's How to Become Myself

Posting for the first time in 2010 from an icy, snowbound London, I wanted to pass on details about this year’s touring programme across the UK from the Japan Foundation, for which, as I have done for the past few years, I acted as advisor. This year’s selection of six films is themed ‘Girls on Film: Females in Contemporary Japanese Cinema’, and runs from 9 to 17 February at the ICA in London, before heading off to other venues, details of which I’m providing below. Copying the blurb about the tour from the JF UK’s website:

“The Japan Foundation’s 2010 touring film programme looks at contemporary Japanese cinema made for, about, and, in some cases, by women. Touring to five venues during February and March, the programme is composed of works from the past few years and showcases how Japanese contemporary filmmakers, from the very established, such as the late Jun Ichikawa, to young and promising filmmakers, like Satoko Yokohama, approach the issues facing women and adolescents. This season also includes works by female directors, reflecting the exciting trend of a marked increase in the number of female directors working in the Japanese film industry. This is a unique collection of films not to be missed!”

Naoko Ogigami's Kamome Diner

I’ll also be giving a talk at the London Office in Russell Square to introduce the season, at 6.30pm on 4 February 2010. It’s free (and usually a few drinks involved too), but you’ll need to book with the Japan Foundation first. More details here.

The tour line up is as follows:

Fourteen (Ju-yon-sai, Hiromasa HIROSUE, 2006)

German Plus Rain (German + Ame, Satoko YOKOHAMA, 2007)

How to Become Myself (Ashita no watashi no tsukurikata, Jun ICHIKAWA, 2007)

Kamome Diner (Kamome shokudo, Naoko OGIGAMI, 2006)

Non-ko (Nonko 36-sai, Kazuyoshi KUMAKIRI, 2009)

Asyl: Park and Love Hotel (Pâku ando rabuhoteru, Izuru KUMASAKA, 2007)

Izuru Kumasaka's Asyl: Park and Love Hotel

And the dates:

9 to 17 February – ICA, London

22 February to 4 March – Showroom, Sheffield

5 to 9 March – Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast (Except Non-ko)

10 to 14 March – Filmhouse, Edinburgh

18 to 21 March – Arnolfini, Bristol

I’ll no doubt be posting up reminders and more details, as they arrive, throughout this month. You can find out information on some of these titles on Midnight Eye of course. Anyway, for most of the films, this is the first time they’re playing in the UK, so I really hope to see you at the screenings or the introductory talk, and please, spread the word!

Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's Nonko

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