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22
Jun
The Third Shinsedai New Generation Japanese Film Festival, 21-24 July 2011

Been busy, busy, busy recently, which is why I’ve been so remiss about posting up details about this year’s Shinsedai New Generation Japanese Film Festival, which I’ve curated with Chris Magee of the Toronto J-Film Pow-wow. For full details of the programme, let me first of all direct you to the new Shinsedai homepage, which for this year has moved URL to http://shinsedai-toronto.com/.

Neil Cantwell and Tim Grabham's remarkable new documentary Kanzeon

There’s another great line-up at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre this July, high points of which include Catcher On the Shore, the directorial debut of 14-year-old Okinawan boy, Ryugo Nakamura (yes, you did read that correctly: 14-year-old!!!), a rare screening of Torajiro Saito’s 1935 Shochiku Kamada comedy Kid’s Commotion starring “the Japanese Charlie Chaplin” Shigeru Ogura and presented with a live Foley sound effects accompaniment and demonstration by Goto Koyama (this is going to be amazing!), and the world premiere of Kanzeon, a stunning new British documentary about Buddhism and music (actually it’s about a whole lot more than that, but it’s sort of difficult to explain – check out the official website). Oh yes, and there’s some other old favourites we screened in London as part of last year’s Zipangu Fest, including the CALF animation programme and Mean-eater Mountain.

Catcher on the Shore, by 14-year-old filmmaking prodigy Ryugo Nakamura

We’re also closing the festival with Yuya Ishii’s Sawako Decides, one of the titles that did the rounds of the UK as part of the Japan Foundation UK’s touring programme earlier this year. If you didn’t catch it in Britain, or if you want to see it again, you’ll be happy to hear that it’s been picked up for distribution byThird Window Films, and will be out in theatres from 8 July, with a DVD to follow. Anyway, I’m not going to go into too much detail about the programme here, other than to cut and paste some of the highlights from Chris’ page, but suffice it to say, its another goodie for Torontonians, so if you’re in the city at the end of July, don’t miss…

I unfortunately won’t be at Shinsedai this year due to scheduling conflicts with another very special film event that is occurring on the other side of the world (well, almost…) in Poland, which I’ll do my utmost to shed some light on before the week is out.

In the meantime, here’s the lowdown on this year’s Shinsedai:

OPENING NIGHT FILM: Hospitalité (dir. Koji Fukuda, 2010)

A sly, humorous and insightful satire of contemporary a Japanese family and the secrets they keep from each other that begins as an homage to the classic domestic dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, but ends up in the comic territory of Tampopo director Juzo Itami.

Sly satire from Koji Fukuda, Hospitalité

HORROR FEATURE: Shirome (dir. Koji Shiraishi, 2010)

Koji Shiraishi, director of “Occult” and the controversial “Grotesque”, revitalizes the J-Horror genre with a mockumentary that combines the low-budget scares of The Blair Witch Project and American Idol instant stardom into an entirely unique and chilling experience.

Blair Witch Project meets The X-Factor, in Koji Shiraishi's Shirome

CENTERPIECE SCREENING: Wandering Home (dir. Yoichi Higashi, 2010)

Tadanobu Asano gives a career defining performance as real-life photojournalist Yutaka Kamoshida as he struggles to overcome alcoholism. Far from being a journey into the underbelly of addiction “Wandering Home” is a life-affirming drama filled with love, gentle humour and reconciliation.

Tadanobu Asano stars in Wandering Home

FAMILY FEATURE: Azemichi Road (dir. Fumie Nishikawa, 2009)

“Azemichi Road” takes the classic underdog genre and gives it new life. Yuki, a young deaf girl, takes a journey from silence to acceptance through her involvement in an amateur dance troupe. Film-maker Fumie Nishikawa sets her feel-good kids film in the gorgeous landscapes of Japan’s countryside.

Fun for all the family, Azemichi Road

SILENT CLASSIC: Kid Commotion (dir. Torajiro Saito, 1935)

The Shinsedai Cinema Festival is very proud to present a special screening of Torajiro Saito’s “Kid Commotion”, starring Japan’s answer to Charlie Chaplin Shigeru Ogura as a harried father, with the accompaniment of live sound effects provided by foley artist Goro Koyama. Audiences will not only have a chance to see a very rare and very funny silent film, but will have the opportunity to learn about the art of movie sound effects.

Vintage Japanese slapstick, Kid's Commotion, presented with a very unusual accompaniment!

CLOSING NIGHT FILM: Sawako Decides (dir. Yuya Ishii, 2010)

Director Yuya Ishii’s return to the Shinsedai Cinema Festival, “Sawako Decides” is the hilarious story of a young woman (actress Hikari Mistushima) who returns to her home town to care for her ailing father and to straighten out her life after a series of low-paying jobs and less than ideal boyfriends.

Soon to go on theatrical release in the UK, Sawako Decides is Shinsedai's Closing Night Screening

Posted at 14:25 on 22 June 2011 Filed under news.
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17
Nov
No More Sailor Suits! Cutting Edge Animation at Zipangu Fest

A week to go till Zipangu Fest gets fully underway, and I have it on good authority (i.e. the Genesis Cinema’s box office) that tickets are selling fast for all screenings. We’ll be making an official announcement about the guests in the next day or two, but I can reveal now that the first is actually arriving later today – Takuro Kochi, sound engineer for Naoyuki Niiya’s Man-eater Mountain, part of the Ero Guro Anime programme. We’re heading down together to introduce the screening at the Cube in Bristol this Friday, held as part of the Encounters Film Festival, and Kochi will still be around for the London premiere of the film the following week.

I should also remind all those in Bristol that the Ero Guro programme is going to be followed by a late night double bill of pink films directed by Yojiro Takita, last year’s recipient of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for the melodrama Departures. Both films are part of Takita’s celebrated Train Pervert or Molester Train series from the 1980s, which I write about at some length in Behind the Pink Curtain, and are being presented in association with the US-distriburor Pink Eiga, who’ve released them on DVD. Details about Sexy Time Trip Ninja can be found on their website here and, for Groper Train: Search for the Black Pearl, here.

Naoyuki Niiya's Man-eater Mountain. Definitely not one for the kids!

But back to the animation. I first caught Man-eater Mountain earlier this year when I was Yubari Film Festival (see my Yubari report from March), and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I have honestly never seen anything like it before. This isn’t animation as such, as the individual scenes don’t actually move. Director Niiya himself describes it more accurately as a kami-shibai or paper theatre animation, after the form of sideshow story-telling popular with children in the prewar period, although I’d have to say, I personally wouldn’t show this film to kids, as there’s some pretty strong stuff in here, particularly during the demonic orgy set at the portal to hell during the climax. This is the stuff of a particularly fervid imagination, a heady brew of ancient Japanese folklore, Edogawa Rampo and HP Lovecraft, beautifully illustrated by Niiya, who also performs all the voices of the characters, with the atmospheric soundscape provided by Kochi. Yubari was also responsible for the revival of Midori: The Girl in the Freakshow, a notorious title from the world of underground animation directed by Hiroshi Harada (and reviewed a few years back on Midnight Eye by Johannes Schonherr). Powerful stuff too, I thought, so this is why you’re seeing a selection of both Niiya and Harada’s quite unforgettable films at this years Zipangu.

Midori: The Girl in the Freakshow - Classic ero guro from Hiroshi Harada.

Such underground indie titles point to the fact, as I often like to point out, that there is a whole lot more to Japanese animation than anime, with its parade of magic girls, pocket monsters, cyborgs and slathering tentacular beasts. Since at least the beginning of the postwar period, there have been a host of individuals exploring the full expressive potential of the animated medium, operating outside of the commercial industry and pushing its artistic limits to the extreme – figures such as Kihachiro Kawamoto, Tadanari Okamoto, Koji Yamamura, Tomoyasu Murata and Kunio Kato, to name but a few. Its pretty difficult for most of us to even find out about the work of most of these practitioners of what is sometimes referred to in Japan as “Art Animation”, a slightly misleading term for what is essentially independent animation. The best place to look is Cathy Munro Hoates wonderful Nishikata Film Review blog – an occasional Midnight Eye contributor, Cathy is currently researching a book on this less commercial side to Japanese animation.

Atsushi Wada's In A Pigs Eye, the modern face of Japanese indie animation.

That said, the main problem in finding out more about indie animation outside of specialist film festivals is simply down to the limited opportunities to see it, which is why I’m really excited about the new CALF animation label founded this year by Nobuaki Doi, and even more excited that he has agreed to work with us for the first ever Zipangu Fest to present a programme of selected works by the various creative agents assembled beneath his banner. So far CALF has put out DVDs by Mirai Mizue, Atsushi Wada, and the TOCHKA collective, with a release of Kei Oyama’s works planned for next Summer. You can read an interview with him talking about the project with Chris Magee on the Toronto J-Film Powwow website, and purchase all the DVDs in question from the CALF website here or, if you’re in London next week, pick them up from the Zipangu Fest merchandise stall.

Lost Utopia, a typically bizarre work from Mirai Mizue.

Of the three disks out so far, my favourite is the one dedicated to Mirai Mizue, whose mesmerising biomorphic patterns reject narrative in favour of colour and movement for the sake of movement. As such, they are rather hard to describe in words, but imagine perhaps, a head-trip movie constructed by Benoit Manderlbrot out of Paisley fabric and pulsating amoebic blobs. The most amazing thing is that each highly detailed frame of these works is actually hand-drawn, not created by computer, even the clear lines and solid blocks of more obviously geometric works such as Modern. What I love most about these is that it is quite clear that Mizue understands how image and sound work together perfectly. The synaesthesic qualities of his work are best encapsulated by Trip!-Trap!, with its jazzy score by Alice Nakamura, and Fantastic Cell, an earlier work realised in 2003 – this latter is unfortunately presented silently, due to rights issues surrounding its use of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, although I do remember finding it online somewhere in its entirety a while back. It comes as no surprise to hear Mizue cite Juan Miro as an influence in the fascinating on-disk interview, but the deliciously funny Devour Dinner, in which various biomorphic critters munch upon one another, also reminded me of another painter, the Surrealist artist Yves Tanguy.

Mirai's wonderful Devour Dinner, one of the many films featured on the CALF DVD release.

Time prevents me from going into more detail about the other two disks at the moment, though I’d hate to suggest that they’re in any way less interesting than Mirai’s and I will endevour to write something about them in the not so distant future, once life has calmed down a bit after Zipangu Fest. All I’ll say now is that I can guarantee all of these films are going to look absolutely fab on the big screen, so definitely one of the hot tickets as far as I’m concerned.

Eye candy - Mirai's Jam is definitely one for the big screen.

Check out the Zipangu Fest website for more details on the Ero Guro programmes at Bristol on Friday 19th and London on Friday 26th, and for Beyond Anime: CALF Animation on Sunday 28th.

Posted at 12:28 on 17 November 2010 Filed under news.
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18
Oct
New Japanese film festival Zipangu Fest warms up for the main event

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.

Posted at 15:32 on 18 October 2010 Filed under news.
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