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!

Posted at 15:58 on 25 August 2010 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• Breaking Boundaries
• Children of the Beehive
• Hiroshi Shimizu
• Leeds International Film Festival
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• Tony Rayns
• Zipangu Fest

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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.

Posted at 16:25 on 28 October 2009 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• Hikari Mitsushima
• ICA
• Leeds International Film Festival
• Love Exposure
• Sakura Ando
• Sion Sono
• Takahiro Nishijima
• Third Window Films

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