Shinsedai guests (from l to r) Yasunobu Takahashi (Locked Out), Gen Takahashi (Confessions of a Dog), Tokachi Tsuchiya (A Normal Life, Please) and Akino Kondoh (Ladybird's Requiem), with Co-Programmer/ Co-Director Chris Magee and Excecutive Director James Heron

Actually this post title is a slightly misleading one. I have no intention of giving you a round up of last weekend’s Shinsedai Cinema Festival in Toronto. I’m too exhausted for a start, after another sleepless night courtesy of the newborn. In fact, I’m currently wondering if I am ever going to have the energy to attempt writing anything significant again. It’s at the 4pm mark at the moment, and I’m just a few minutes away from retreating back to bed after spending most of the day glowering unproductively through my headache at the screen. Secondly, as I wasn’t actually there in Toronto for the fest, my distant observations probably wouldn’t mean very much anyway. So instead, I just want to point you all in the direction of other some fest write-ups from those who actually were there. I will state first of all though that this year’s edition sounded like a rousing success, with attendances around double that of our inaugural year and a good time had by all, from what I’ve heard.

During the Opening Night screening of Kakera, Momoko Ando meets with a very special audience member, the esteemed director Deepa Mehta, as James Heron looks on

For those that are interested, first up there’s the Shinsedai website itself, which has two posts from Marc Saint-Cyr of the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow written as the festival was ongoing. My co-programmer on Shinsedai, and Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow founder Chris Magee has also written up a review for Confessions of a Dog on his site, one of the talking point films of the fest, and one which viewers in the UK will have a chance to get a look at very soon. Cathy Munroe Hotes also has a review of the film on her blogspot, the Nishikata Film Review. (Just a quick note, but director Gen Takahashi has already had one film released on DVD in the UK, which is the completely-different Goth: Love Of Death.) The same site has a review of Yasunobu Takahashi’s Locked Out.

Toronto based experimental outfit Vowls get ready to lay down the live score to Kenji Mizoguchi's Water Magician

Bob Turnball of the Row Three blogspot has a review of the screening of Mizoguchi’s The Water Magician with live accompaniment by Vowls, a unique event I am really pissed off I wasn’t able to get out there for, but am glad to hear it was very well attended and people loved it, while Tetsuaki Matsue’s Live Tape gets a great write up on cineAWESOME. And I’m sure there’s more if you hunt around for it, but for now, to get a flavour of the mood of the weekend, check out Jon Jung’s photo album he put up on Facebook and take a listen to his VCinema podcast on the website Varied Celluloid, in which he and Marc Saint-Cyr talk about Kakera, followed by an interview with the film’s director and festival guest Momoko Ando. This is the first of a number of podcasts Jon Jung has planned from Shinsedai, and I should also say a big thanks to him for providing the pix that accompany the post. Thanks!

Life has been even crazier than usual these past few weeks, which is why there have not been any posts recently and there my not be that many more in the immediate future either. For those that don’t know, my beautiful partner Michelle gave birth to our son, Thorin, at 2.30am on 8th July, so the past week has been something of a mixture of euphoria, blind panic, disbelief and head-mashed exhaustion. Wonderful news, being a dad, but I won’t bore you all with the details at this juncture. No, I’ve got a few other announcements to make first….

You're forgiven if you missed it, but Gen Takahashi's Confessions of a Dog was the best Japanese film of 2006!

First up is a reminder that next weekend in Toronto it is the 2nd Shinsedai Cinema Festival, a four-day showcase of the best recent Japanese films taking place in the Japan Canadian Cultural Centre between 22-25 July. There’s a link to this on the right hand of this page, just beneath Graham Humphrey’s masterful portrait of me, or you can click on the ‘events’ tab up above and you’ll get a whole load more info about this, including a map showing you how to get you to there, should you be in Toronto or anywhere near at the time – you’ve no excuse for not going! I do have an excuse for not going, of course, namely the baby, as well as the Atlantic ocean between me and the JCCC, but I did go last year and would have done again this year if I didn’t have another hungry mouth in the house to feed. It’s going to be amazing, I promise you.

There are some brilliant films playing, including some of the best-regarded titles of the past year, such as Tetsuaki Matsue’s Live Tape, Koya Yoshida’s Yuriko’s Aroma, Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life and Tokachi Tsuchiya’s A Normal Life Please, plus a few revivals/rediscoveries, notably Go Shibata’s stunning 1999 debut NN-891102 and Gen Takahashi’s epic The Wire-styled expose of police corruption Confessions of a Dog, a film I am frankly amazed so few people know about given that it was made back in 2006, although one which I am pretty sure will be picking up a lot more interest as the year progresses.

And another scene from Confessions of a Dog, as I love this film so much!

Another thing I am particularly excited about this year is a screening of Kenji Mizoguchi’s hauntingly beautiful silent classic The Water Magician, with a new soundtrack by the Toronto-based experimental outfit Vowls (their website is here, and you can also have a listen on myspace. Japanese silent films are rarely screened outside of Japan, but along with Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Page of Madness, this is one of the best of the limited handful of titles that survive, and it’s from one of the world’s greatest ever directors too. It looks absolutely gorgeous, with Mizoguchi’s atmospheric tracking shots and Kyoko Izumi’s vaguely ero-guro style carnival milieu making this a must-see, and the live accompaniment is only going to work in its favour. I’m actually gutted I am not going to be there!

Kenji Mizoguchi's haunting Water Magician, playing at Shinsedai with a live score by Vowls

There’s a whole host of filmmaker guests going to be attending too, including Akino Kondoh, Gen Takahashi, Momoko Ando, Yasunobu Takahashi and Tokachi Tsuchiya. Anyway, there’s a lot more info about the festival on the Shinsedai website, but if you are a Japanese film fan or scholar and are based in Toronto or its immediate environs, you will not get a better selection of films laid out for you than this.

Right, my next bit of news comes courtesy of Matteo Boscarol, who has his own impressive looking Italian-language blog on all things Japan-related. It is about the Italian DVD release of Masao Adachi’s Gushing Prayer, or rather Gushing Prayer: A 15-Year-Old Prostitute as it was originally known: when I got a new print struck up from the original negative as one of the films to go out on the various screening to promote Behind the Pink Curtain (its played at the British Film Institute, Austin Fantastic Fest, Montreal Fantasia, Thessaloniki and Nippon Connection so far), I decided it was wise to suppress any insinuations of underage sex in its title to facilitate its passage through customs. Those that have seen it will know it is not some lurid jailbait fantasy, but a rather haunting avant-garde work that takes a metaphorical look at the student protests in Japan in the 1960s. Or something like that. I’m still not entirely sure what it means. This was a film that got a rather polarised response during its festival screenings, with some viewers scratching their heads non-plused before moving on and dismissing it as pretentious, and others bowled over by its rather melancholy tone and fascinating snap shots of Tokyo back in the day. Personally I love it, but whatever your take, you can’t deny its uniqueness. Now it is finally available for viewing on DVD, and I have it on good authority that the release by Raro Video actually has English as well as Italian subs, which I take to mean that they haven’t blocked out the English language subs that were burnt into the actual print as we prepared it. So this is great news for all Adachi fans, and if you’re interested, then please allow me to direct you to one of the several online retailers offering it up for order here.

Italian DVD release by Raro Video of Masao Adachi's Gushing Prayer, with English subtitles!

I also don’t know if I’m giving too much away here, as I think it is something of an open secret, but there will be a Masao Adachi retrospective in France later in the year, which should result in some of his other films being released on DVD. If there are any readers who don’t have a clue who Adachi is, then I’ll point you to an interview I did with him for Midnight Eye a few years back.

So that just leaves one other brief topic before I sign off for today, which is the publication of issue two of the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema. Articles include Olga V Solovieva’s Kurosawa Akira’s The Idiot: Where the East meets the West, Isolde Standish’s Night and Fog in Japan: Fifty Years On and Steven Rawle’s From The Black Society to The Isle: Miike Takashi and Kim Ki-Duk at the intersection of Asia Extreme.

There’s also a rather nice review of Behind the Pink Curtain by Stephen Prince, who writes “Jasper Sharp gives us a detailed history of the pink film, copiously illustrated and written in an accessible and engaging manner… [he is] an able guide to this inchoate genre that fused social subversion and crass exploitation… Behind the Pink Curtain will not soon be equaled in its portrait of a cinematic demi-monde whose film-makers have flaunted their status as outlaws and outsiders.” Nice!

From the New York Times, an image from Why Husbands Flirt (1918), one of the 75 silent films recently discovered in New Zealand that are being returned to the United States.

This morning I found two such stories linked to my facebook page. First up, both Cathy Munroe Hotes, who keeps a pretty nifty Japanese film-related blogspot of her own, Nishikata Eiga, and Daniel Bird directed me to this article in the New York Times, reporting how some 75 vintage Hollywood films believed to be no longer extant have been discovered in an archive in New Zealand, including John Ford’s Upstream (1927), the comedy Mary of the Movies (1923), which is the earliest Columbia feature known to survive, and The Woman Hater (1910), an early outing for Perils of Pauline star Pearl White. The story is also reported in the UK paper The Guardian. It’s going to take a while to restore all these, and even then, one wonders how easy they’ll be for most of us to see – silent films are hardly the greatest money-spinners on the DVD market. Anyway, the films are being restored by the National Film Preservation Foundation in America, and if you look on their homepage, you can already see a few clips from one of the films, The Sergeant (1910), “one of the earliest surviving narratives shot on location in Yosemite Valley.”

The Sergeant (1910): “one of the earliest surviving narratives shot on location in Yosemite Valley.”

This is a pretty great site really. You can watch several of the films they’ve restored previously online, although the clips they do have really do have one begging for more. Some of my favourites are this rather saucy trailer for the long-lost title The Sin Woman (c. 1922); the early animation Mutt and Jeff: On Strike (1920), clearly made before the days when cel-animation was the norm, because you can see the blurs around the characters where they’ve rubbed them out and redrawn them over the backgrounds; and this fascinating early documentary-travelogue A Trip through Japan with the YWCA, filmed around 1919.

The second bit of news came once more courtesy of Daniel Bird. It pertains to an article on the BBC website about a 1935 Soviet film entitled Kara Bogaz, which was never actually released because it was made without the authorisation of Stalin. The film was the first ever production in Turkmenistan, but it has been lying around in the vaults for some 75 years, unscreened and forgotten. It’s getting an airing tonight in London, at Free Word in Farringdon, a venue I must confess I’d never even heard of before. Annoyingly, I only found out about it today, and have other commitments for this evening, but, I know it’s short notice, maybe some of you reading this might find time to fit it in.

Kara Bogaz, the first production from Soviet Turkmenistan, unseen for 75 years.

Still, these reports led me to a bit of internet trawling this morning, and reminded me what a wealth of obscure cinematic treasures there are for viewing online, films you’ll never have heard of from the early days of cinema, and films from some of the furthest-flung reaches of the world. Earlier this year, Sight and Sound conducted a poll of its contributors’ favourite online resources; the resulting article never appeared in print, but can be found on the magazine’s website. There’s some pretty interesting discoveries to be found here. For example, did you know that Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Love of Sumako (Joyu Sumako no koi), one of his lesser known works from 1947, is available to watch in its entirety on Youtube? I didn’t until I was pointed in its direction by Brad Stevens. London Screen Archive also has a Youtube channel of its own, full of valuable archive material of our great capital, and you can also catch this year’s Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 11-minute short Phantoms of Nabua online here. If Senegalese cinema is something of a mystery to you, well, why not check out the 1973 feature, Touki Bouki,  directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. And while you’re at it, how about checking out The Feminists Art Project, which features some classic experimental work from, among others, Maya Deren and Germaine Dulac.

Touki Bouki (1973), described by some as "the Senagalese Rebel Without a Cause."

My own choice is the Europa Film Treasures website, which could keep you occupied for hours with its collection of early titles from Europe and America, and a good host of contextual information about the films and their makers too. My top choice is this proto sci-fi title, The Airship Destroyer (Der Luftkrieg der Zukunft), made way back in 1909 by Walter R Booth. Or how about following this link here, from which you’ll learn that the industry of the country that spawned Michael Haneke pioneered the production of early cheesecake one-reelers sporting titles such as The Saucy Chambermaid. Why, one need never leave the house to go to the cinema again!

Early scif-fi in William Booth's The Aircraft Destroyer (1909).

If anyone reading this has any other links to share, please don’t be shy. Post them in my comments section. I’m all ears (and eyes).

Since our inaugural year in 2009 so many great films have come out of Japan. Shinsedai Cinema Festival co-programmers Jasper Sharp (Midnight Eye) and Chris MaGee (Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow) have spent the past eight months watching as many of these films as humanly possible so that they can bring the best independent, and in many cases under-appreciated, Japanese films to movie audiences here in Toronto. From July 22nd to July 25th, 2010 the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre will be hosting this celebration of Japanese film, and while Sharp and MaGee are still putting the finishing touches on the 2nd annual Shinsedai Cinema Festival line-up we are proud to announce the first block of films that audiences can expect this year at the JCCC.

Live Tape – The Toronto Premiere of Tetsuaki Matsue’s award-winning concert documentary featuring indie singer-songwriter Kenta Maeno. Shot on New Year’s Day 2009 in one single unbroken take Matsue and Maeno take us on a musical tour of Tokyo’s Musashino district. Winner of the top prize in the Japanese Eyes programme at the 2009 Tokyo International Film Festival and the Nippon Digital Award at the 2010 Nippon Connection Japanese Film Festival in Frankfurt.

Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Water Magician – The silent 1933 classic by one of Japan’s most revered directors is also one of Japanese cinema’s very first independently produced films. The love story between a renowned female performer who literally makes water dance across the stage and an impoverished carriage driver will be brought to life with live musical accompaniment by Toronto experimental quartet Vowls. Not to be missed! *Co-presented with the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival*

Confessions of a Dog – A gritty police epic that exposes the corrupt underbelly of Japanese law enforcement, Gen Takahashi’s Confessions of a Dog was too controversial to receive a theatrical release in Japan. The drama that stars Shun Sugata as a police detective who not only bends the rules but breaks them ended up having to be distributed through Hong Kong to festivals world wide. We are proud to premiere the film in Canada and to have Gen Takahashi as our guest.

Island of Dreams – First time feature director Tetsuichiro Tsuta goes against the trend of shooting on hi-def video with his film Island of Dreams, an homage to 1960s films of Akira Kurosawa, Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukasaku. Tsuta and his crew not only shot this eco-thriller on 16mm black-and-white film, but also developed and edited the film entirely by hand.

The Dark Harbour – A hilariously downbeat comedy with a heart, Naito Takatsugu’s The Dark Harbour will be having its Canadian premiere at Shinsedai. The story of a lonely fisherman who discovers a single mother and her son hiding in his closet The Dark Harbour brings to mind the straight-faced comedy of Finnish master Aki Kaurismaki.

The Red Spot – Marie Miyayama’s Japanese/ German co-produced debut feature is a touching drama about a young Japanese woman who travels to Bavaria to search for the exact spot where a car accident took the life of her parents and younger brother 18 years before. What she discovers in Germany is more than just a red spot on a map though.

Different Cities – Experimental video artist Kazuhiro Goshima uses subtle CGI-animation to clear Tokyo of all but a handful of its inhabitants in Different Cities. We follow five inter-weaving characters as they wake up to discover they’ve become lost in their own city.

Yuki Kawamura Trilogy – Musician, video artist, and now filmmaker Yuki Kawamura has crafted three touching Ozu-esque drama’s about the impermamance of life and the magic that can be found in a single moment. Mixing traditional Japanese Noh theatre and modern hi-def technology these three films – Spark, Angel Robe and Grandmother – will be receiving their Toronto premiere at Shinsedai.

Ladybirds’ Requiem – Artist and animator Akino Kondoh’s first short film The Evening Traveling was a huge hit at Shinsedai last year, so this year we’ve not only programmed Kondoh’s second animated short Ladybirds’ Requiem, but we are featuring her 2004 painting Red Fishes as our official poster image. To top it all off Kondoh will be in attendance at this year’s festival.

That’s just a smaple of what audiences can expect this year at the 2nd annual Shinsedai Cinema Festival. Check back on June 17th for the full line-up and schedule of this year’s festival!