Zipangu Fest 2011 design by Michael Lomon

If you want to read the original press releases, you can find them on the press section of our website here, but if you want more basic details about the lineup, you can find the full schedule either on the ICA website or on the Zipangu Fest website.

Basically we’ve divided the programme into four sections, all of which overlap and inter-link in various cunning ways that I’m about to outline: Sounds of Zipangu, Experimental/Animation, Zipangu Retro, and Nuclear Reactions. The first section consists of two European-produced documentaries that look at Japanese avant-garde/experimental music and the traditional, religious and contemporary cultural forces that inform it, with We Don’t Care About Music Anyway… and KanZeOn both looking as good as they sound.

We Don't Care About Music Anyway... (Cédric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz)

The latter film, which also screened over this summer at Shinsedai in Toronto and EvA in Estonia, provides the inspiration for our opening party, which features an astounding line-up of DJs and performers, not least in the form of tat2mi, the beat-boxing Buddhist monk featured in the film in his first ever London performance. The event, to be held in the ICA’s bar, boasts a live remix of the visuals by Amoeba.Av with director/cinematographer Tim Grabham (aka Cinema Iloobia).

I’ve already posted the flyer for this party just below this entry on my blog, so do feel free to circulate, won’t you!  You can win tickets for our marvellous opening screening and party via this competition on the Japan Centre website.

All of this links rather nicely with another film in this section, Abraxas, about a former punk musician turned Buddhist monk who finds himself drawn back to give just one more performance. Not only is the soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo, a towering figure in Japan’s avant-garde scene who is featured in We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…, but coincidentally the film was shot in the rural Fukushima region devastated by the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March of this year.

Set in Fukushima and featuring a soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo and a starring turn by Suneohair, Naoki Kato's Abraxas.

The earthquake of course can’t help but cast a long shadow over any Japan-related events this year. Zipangu Fest will be doing their bit to raise awareness and hopefully a bit of money to help those affected when we move temporarily out of the ICA on Tuesday 22 Nov for a special charity screening of experimental films at Cafe Oto in Dalston. The two Nippon Re-Read programmes, as announced previously on this website, are part of a touring programme curated by Kinema Nippon (Aily Nash and Nine Yamamoto-Masson) and cover key works in the history of Japanese experimental film from the 1960s to present.

If you’re interested in either experimental film or Japanese cinema, the Nippon Re-Read: Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I & II night on Tues 22 Nov presents a unique chance to watch these works placed within an informative yet fun context at one of London’s funkiest venues (worth visiting for the okonomiyaki and decent bar prices alone). It’s only £5 to get in, although you are free to pay more as all profits will go to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, and you can also buy advance tickets via WeGotTickets. As if this wasn’t amazing enough value for money in its own right, legendary London-based Japanese psychedelic rockers Bo Ningen will also be in attendance to perform a live soundtrack to Tatsuo Sato’s surreal animated classic Cat Soup from 2001.

Experimental films and a live performance from Bo Ningen at Cafe Oto on 22 Nov

This provides me with two ways to segue back into the other parts of the programme, but I’ll take the Experimental/Anime route. Alongside Abraxas on Saturday we have the Beyond Anime: The Outer Limits programme which, to whet your appetite for Cat Soup, will provide a wonderful and revealing glimpse of the innovation and creativity in Japan’s independent animation scene. This is a truly amazing sample of works covering a wide range of ground, but I’ll say it now, Sayaka Oka’s mesmerising Melting Medama is about the closest thing to a religious epiphany I’ve experienced this year.

What eyes are made for - Sayaka Oku's Melting Medama, part of the Beyond Anime programme

On a similar tack is the Enter the Cosmos programme of three works by that maestro of cinematic abstraction, Takashi Makino. His recent film Still in Cosmos will be screened as part of Tuesday’s Nippon Re-Read earthquake appeal night, but here’s a unique chance to immerse yourself in the full experience, with Makino himself there to introduce the films. Linking back to the Sounds of Zipangu section, Makino’s films are collaborations with some of the the foremost international talents of noise and soundscape music, including Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek. Another connection is that both Makino and KanZeOn’s Tim Grabham have served some time under the Quay Brothers, an influence that will become all the more clear when you see the Death of Phonebook animation made by Tim (under his customary handle of Cinema Iloobia), the honorary gaijin included in the Beyond Anime section.

Shasyo, one of several of Ryu Furusawa's films included in the Beyond Anime section

On the other side of the Sounds of Zipangu musical spectrum lies the sickly sweet strains of J-pop teeny band Momoiro Clover, as featured in Koji Shiraishi’s hilariously cruel J-horror mockumentary Shirome. Watch the tribe of teen songstresses agree to sell their souls for fame and fortune, and remember, nothing about their performance is faked for the camera!

Horror also lies at the heart of one of our Zipangu Retro screenings, and I am absolutely delighted that we have managed to make this come together, in partnership with the National Film Centre of Tokyo and the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy. Never seen before in the UK, the 1938 supernatural chiller Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen is going to shake up a few preconceptions about the development of the horror around the world during is early decades, revealing that the genre was alive and kicking in Japan long before the films of Nobuo Nakagawa for Shintoho in the 1950s. Pioneering director Ushihara went to Hollywood to study filmmaking under Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s, so it is no surprise that he kept more than one eye on other developments in American cinema throughout his career. Personally I think that with its well-deployed arsenal of kaleidoscopic lenses, double-exposures and slow-mo sequences, in the expressionistic stakes Ghost Cat is easily abreast of, if not ahead of the Universal horrors of the period. Zipangu Fest have especially arranged to get this film subtitled and available for English speaking audiences, so make sure you don’t miss it while it is screening over here – the film gets its UK premiere ahead of Zipangu Fest at Leeds International Film Festival on Tues 8 and Thurs 10 Nov, and will be playing in Bradford in December and Newcastle in March. More details as they come, but if anyone out there reading this is also interested in showing this rare gem anywhere else, then drop me a line!

Vintage chills in our UK premiere of Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen

And our second Zipangu Retro screening takes us into our final section, Nuclear Reactions. Lucky Dragon No. 5 is a little-seen work by a pretty well-known director, Kaneto Shindo. One of the most important figures in the history of independent cinema in Japan, Shindo is primarily known in the West for his two horror films Onibaba and Kuroneko (another film about a ghostly black cat!), but also for a number of films on the subject of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the director’s own birthplace of Hiroshima, beginning with the first fictional work from Japan on the subject, Children of Hiroshima (1952) right up to his latest film Postcard (2011), realised at the age of 98. I have no idea when was the last time this film was shown in the United Kingdom, if ever, but suffice it to say, you probably won’t get another chance to see it soon. The film is a docudrama based on a real life incident in which the crew of a fishing trawler were caught in the vicinity of American atomic bomb testing in the Pacific during the 1950s. The incident is pretty well-known today, if only because it inspired the original Godzilla.

Shinpei Takeda's poignant documentary road trip, Hiroshima Nagasaki Download.

Lest we forget, the legacy of the atomic bomb is the subject of our second film in the Nuclear Reactions section, with Hiroshi Nagasaki Download detailing a road-trip by the Mexican-based Japanese artist Shinpei Takeda, who will be coming as a guest of Zipangu Fest to introduce his film, as he and his college friend embark on a road trip across North America to interview a number of the survivors of this tragedy who have now made their homes outside of Japan.

The Nuclear Reactions section is our attempt to remember the potentially lethal destructive power of atomic energy, whether used militarily or to provide our energy needs, with a series of four films produced in a country that has suffered the most from its misuse. The nuclear power debate in Britain seems to have already died down in the wake of the catastrophe at the Fukushima power plant, a power plant that politicians repeatedly told the Japanese public was completely safe. In Japan, Hitomi Kamanaka has made several films that have attempted to delve beneath the claims of the politicians long before the disaster, and her findings in the two films that we are screening at the festival, are both chilling and yet also provide hope for those who are prepared to engage with the issues more fully. With the director travelling to Sellafield in the first of these two films to investigate a radiation leak that already seems to have been forgotten by the British media and public, the films offer little in the way of cold comfort for those still convinced by the “can’t happen here” argument.

So what do you do with nuclear waste? Hitomi Kamanaka's Rokkasho Rhapsody provides a chilling answer.

So there’s a guide through our programme for this year’s Zipangu Fest. No doubt there are even more links between the films if you look for them, and we really hope this years festival succeeds in fulfilling our goal of bringing people together to enjoy these films, and to talk about them and other related matters. I’m certainly looking forward to it myself!

Almost forgot too, just a few days before the festival, me and Julian Ross will be at the Horse Hospital near Russell Sq at the invitation of Electric Sheep magazine for An Evening of Subversive Japanese Cinema. Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor will present a screening of Koji Wakamatsu’s anarcho-pinku Sex Jack (1970) to tie-in with their recent book publication The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, while Julian and I will be there to provide some cultural background to the film as well as another screening of one of the top hits from last year’s Zipangu Fest, Naoyuki Niiya’s ero-guro kami-shibai animation Man-eater Mountain.

Yumehiro Imanari's highly entertaining documentary short The Student Wrestler, playing alongside Hiroshima Nagasaki Download

In the meantime, here’s a link to an interview I did with Zoe Baxter on her Lucky Cat show on Resonance FM last Saturday (29 October), in which I talk a lot more about the films and a few other things besides.

Parts of Zipangu Fest’s programme will be touring to the Bradford Media Museum on 10-12 December, and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle in January.

More news as it comes, and again, if there are any venues out there in the UK that are interested in hosting parts of the Zipangu Fest programme, then do drop us a line.

And in the meantime, you can sign up to our press list, our Facebook page and our Twitter feed.

Where: ICS Cinema, University of Leeds

When: 6th November 2010

‘Breaking Boundaries’ is an inter‐institutional project organized by postgraduate students at the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York through the Mixed Cinema Network project and beyond. Its aim is to propose alternative approaches to Japanese cinema, moving beyond East-­West binary oppositions, thus encouraging the exploration of new and exciting critical avenues.

The organisers welcome proposals from researchers at any stage of their project, and will accept proposals from those within and beyond the academic field of film studies.

Please send a 400‐word abstract and 150­‐word biography to: bbconf2010@googlemail.com. The deadline for application is September 20th 2010.

Tony Rayns will be present at the event as the keynote speaker, and the symposium is included as part of Leeds Intentional Film Festival.

The symposium will  conclude with a screening of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive (1948) organised in conjunction with Zipangu Fest.

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.

The first of a series of rare UK screenings of Hiroshi Shimizu's Children of the Beehive (1948) begins in Leeds, organised by Zipangu Fest

This posting is one of a number that are going to appear on this website over the near future related to Zipangu Fest, the new Japanese film festival I am putting together here in the UK for November of this year (and beyond…!) We’ve been leaking bits about the festival by way of our Facebook and Twitter groups for a while now, but be prepared for the information to start coming thick and fast from now on, on the festival’s own website, and of course on this one here.

Anyway, here’s an event that we’re partially involved with, one which fits within the Zipangu Fest mindset of spreading knowledge and appreciation of Japanese cinema as far and wide within the United Kingdom as possible. It’s a symposium that will be taking place at the University of Leeds on 6th November 2010, about 3 weeks before the festival begins properly in London – there’s going to be a few other events in London and Bristol as well in the run up to the main Zipangu Fest dates 23-28 November, so keep your eyes peeled for more info about these too.

The symposium itself is being put together by Julian Ross of the University of Leeds as part of the 24th Leeds International Film Festival, which this year runs 4-21 Nov, and has always had a really good Japanese film programme. The symposium organisers are looking for anyone who is interested to deliver papers on their subjects of research, whatever stage this research might be at. If you’re interested, please send a 400-word abstract and 150-word biography to: bbconf2010@googlemail.com. The deadline for application is September 20th 2010. Tony Rayns will be in attendance as the keynote speaker.

Hiroshi Shimizu's early classic of Japanese independent cinema, Children of the Beehive

I’ll be there delivering a paper myself, but Zipangu Fest’s main involvement is that we have organised the post-symposium screening of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive (Hachi no su no kodomo-tachi), his 1948 classic of Japanese independent cinema, and the first film he directed following his departure from Shochiku. Readers of Midnight Eye will know what a huge fan we all are of Shimizu, me in particular, so you might want to get scouring the various reviews and articles we’ve had about his work over the past 7 years since Tokyo FILMeX held their retrospective of his works in 2003: for example, Sayon’s Bell, Mr Thank you, The Introspection Tower and a selection of his silent films.

Children of the Beehive was the film that stuck out the most for me during the FILMeX retrospective, and I’ve been meaning to bring it to the UK ever since. It will also be screened again for the general public on another day during the Leeds Film Festival, separate from this symposium, and I don’t think it is giving too much away if I say that this will be one of the titles playing at the main Zipangu Fest festival in the Genesis Cinema in London between 23-28 November – it will also be playing in Bristol in December, but more of this closer to the time.

Children of the Beehive focuses on the plight of ten war orphans hailing from different cities across Japan. With nowhere to go, they scavenge around train stations, scratching out an existence by means of black market work for a one-legged tramp whilst avoiding being picked up by the police for vagrancy. Soon however, they find a more inspiring role model in the figure of a nameless soldier just repatriated after the war. An orphan himself, the soldier also has no home to return to, and so sets out across the country with the kids in tow in search of work before settling on the goal of leading them to the orphanage where he himself grew up.

Anyway, I’m going to reproduce the Call For Papers notice from Breaking Boundaries in full here, in the hope that some of you reading this will want to get involved.

Call for Papers

White Rose University Consortium Mixed Cinema Network: University of Leeds, University of Sheffield, University of York

University of Leeds Symposium – Breaking Boundaries: Alternative Approaches to Japanese Film.

6th November 2010, ICS Cinema, University of Leeds.

Symposium Convenor: Julian Ross

Keynote Speaker: Tony Rayns

Post-symposium Screening: ‘Children of the Beehive’ (Shimizu, 1948) courtesy of Zipangu Fest.

The event has been coordinated as part of the 24th Leeds International Film Festival (4-21 Nov 2010). For more information on Leeds International Film Festival, please visit www.leedsfilm.com.

Please note that selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, edited by David Desser and published by Intellect. For more information on the journal, please visit here.

No other region is expected to have a more profound impact on the future global system and society than East Asia, and accordingly, understanding the culture and arts of the countries in this region is becoming increasingly vital to the work of academics. Japanese cinema, in particular, has recently experienced a resurgence of interest within and beyond academic confines. In the UK, recent major retrospectives of directors such as Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa organized by the British Film Institute, among many other events across the country, have contributed to an increased awareness of this burgeoning subject area. The number of Hollywood remakes of Japanese texts and films and the recent trend of Western directors travelling to Tokyo to shoot their films are also indicative of an interest which cuts across theory and practice. It seems particularly timely to discuss the ways in which we can address Japanese cinema and its relevance to world cinema, film studies and other disciplines.

‘Breaking Boundaries’ is an inter‐institutional project organized by postgraduate students at the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York through the Mixed Cinema Network project and beyond. Our aim is to propose alternative approaches to Japanese cinema, moving beyond East-­West binary oppositions, thus encouraging the exploration of new and exciting critical avenues.

Although all proposals will be considered, we particularly welcome papers that explore the following themes we have set up as panels:

• Japanese Cinema Within and Beyond the Nation

• Interdisciplinarity and Intertextuality in Japanese Cinema

• Questions of Gender in Japanese Film

• Reception of Japanese Films Home and Abroad

We welcome proposals from researchers at any stage of their project, and we will accept proposals from those within and beyond the academic field of film studies.

Please send a 400‐word abstract and 150­‐word biography to: bbconf2010@googlemail.com

The deadline for application is September 20th 2010. We look forward to hearing from you!

Hikari Mitsushima in Sion Sono's Love Exposure

It’s done great guns on the festival circuit and now, courtesy of Third Window Films, Love Exposure is just about to get its official UK release with a month-long run at the ICA in London this November, with a screening on November 14^th at Leeds International Film Festival and no doubt other dates in the UK to follow. It’s surely a bold move on the behalf of both Third Window Films and the ICA, but (and I’m getting almost tired of saying this), DO NOT BE PUT OFF BY THE 4-HOUR RUNNING TIME! This is the strongest film from Japan I’ve seen in a long-time. Read any review you can find online about it, ask anyone who has seen it. They’ll all tell you the same thing – it’s an absolutely fantastic experience, so intense you’ll be still struggling to assimilate it all for days, nay weeks, after you’ve seen it. The film whips along at such a cracking pace that you’re barely registering the time, and when the interval occurs, it seems like a major inconvenience.

Takahiro Nishijima, the star of Love Exposure

I’ve experienced the film twice already, firstly on DVD while looking for suitable titles for this year’s Raindance, and secondly at Raindance itself. The first time I thought it would take a couple of sittings to get through, but it didn’t take too long for me to realise I was in for the long haul. The second time, at the festival itself, was my first chance seeing it on a big screen, and I was so immersed in it that even then I knew I simply had to see it again, so I’ll most certainly be trotting off to the ICA at some juncture. And this seems to be the typical response. Several at the Japanese guests at Raindance had already seen the film several times. One chalked up their sixth viewing at the festival – that’s a full day in total of Sion Sono’s masterpiece! Another reported their experience of seeing the film in Tokyo, in which during the interval the other viewers could be seen wandering around with ecstatic expressions on their faces, and I couldn’t but help notice a similar phenomenon at Raindance. Ooh, I’m getting goose-pimples just thinking about it. My only regret is that the film was originally meant to be six hours, and Sono had to cut it down by a quarter at the insistence of his producer. I can only pray that at some point we’ll ever get a chance to see the full cut.

Sakura Ando and friends

Not sure what else I can say to anyone but to implore you to go see it. If you’ve seen it once, then see it again, tell your friends what a masterpiece it is. And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, then here’s a quick taster in the form of the trailer.

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