Jasper Sharp » Raindance

Pioneering Woman Pink Director Sachi Hamano Interviewed by Electric Sheep

Jasper — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:01:35 +0000

Sachi Hamano in London (photo by Fei Phoon)

Raindance seems like aeons ago, and I’ve still not got round to transcribing most of the interviews I conducted with our Japanese guests this year. Don’t worry, you’ll be getting a chance to read these in the not-too-distant future on Midnight Eye, but until then, you can make do with this interview with Sachi Hamano which has recently been put up on the website of Electric Sheep magazine. I covered Sachi Hamano in quite some detail in my book Behind the Pink Curtain. For those not familiar with her name, she’s not only the most prolific woman film director in Japan, but also one of the most (if not the most) prolific pink film directors, which probably makes her among the most prolific filmmakers in the world, male or female. It was a real honour to have her at Raindance this year as one of the people featured in the Japanese Woman Directors programme, where her non-pink comedy Lily Festival played to great aplomb, and I am delighted that Electric Sheep’s Virginie Sélavy recognised Sachi Hamano’s achievements in the industry and wanted to talk to her, as the interview makes for quite fascinating reading. As I’ve posted before, Electric Sheep also interviewed another Raindance guest, Momoko Ando, which went online last month. I should also point out that the photo of Hamano was taken during her stay in London by Fei Phoon, one of the whizz kids behind the design of this website.

On a sourer note, the latest print edition of Electric Sheep appears to be its last, at least in its current form, with the editors attributing the gloomy financial climate to its demise. Its very sad, because Electric Sheep plugged a valuable gap in the film media, giving intelligent coverage to films that weren’t necessarily getting covered elsewhere. The website will continue, as will the editors’ admirable attempts to broaden film culture with regular screenings in London of films that you rarely get a chance to see on the big screen nowadays. Anyway, you can pick up the Winter 2009 issue at a good magazine stockist, if you can find one – I was going to suggest Borders on Charing Cross Road, but it was just announced a couple of weeks ago that Borders UK has just filed for administration. One wonders if any of us in this country are going to get out of this recession in one piece!

A brief look at Raindance Best UK Feature, Down Terrace

Jasper — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:52:17 +0000

Father and son, head to head in Ben Wheatley's amazing Down Terrace

Am now in Bristol in the midst of the Shohei Imamura retrospective down at the Arnolfini. First screening last night of Ballad of Narayama, a title I hadn’t seen for quite some time, and my, had I forgotten how good it was! This is arguably Imamura’s most perfect film, although perhaps I should hold off my judgement because, to my shame, I have never actually seen Profound Desire of the Gods, which gets a very rare UK screening on Sunday. For those interested who can’t make it to Bristol, the retro is travelling up to the ICA at the end of the month, then not long after up to Glasgow. Full day of lectures and discussions about Imamura tomorrow, with me delivering one such sermon trying to set Imamura’s body of work into some sort of context within the 1960s.

Down Terrace

Anyway, even though I’ve now moved onto the next thing, I still hope to find time to piece together some of the fragments of thoughts about the various films that played at Raindance, before the whole festival disappears from my memory into a murky haze. The next film under the spotlight is the winner of this year’s Best UK Feature, Down Terrace, directed by Ben Wheatley. This is a film that has come out of absolutely nowhere this year. It received its international premiere at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, where it won best screenplay and Next Wave best feature, so with only two festivals it’s already won three prizes – a pretty impressive track record, for sure. The film was produced by Mondo Macabro’s Andy Starke, and is a far cry indeed from his last project, the Pakistani zombie movie Hell’s Ground.

David Schaal, Robin Hill and Ben Wheatley, Best UK Feature winners for Down Terrace

Nevertherless, it’s still a pretty eccentric mix of black comedy, realist drama and some particularly grisly murders – imagine The Sopranos directed in the style of Eastenders. If you’re into Brit humour and directors such as Shane Meadows, chances are you’ll love it. Director Ben Wheatley has an impressive background in TV comedy, and many of the cast will be familiar from such recent cult series as Spaced, Extras, The Office et al. Many of the others are non-professionals. One thing I never realized until the Q&A also, is that it was not only shot in the house where main actor Robin Hill grew up, but his father in the film, Bill, is actually played by his real-life father, Bob Hill, in a brilliant performance – his improvised reminiscences of the 1960s were hysterical. Sharp dialogue, tight pacing and a perfect balance of acerbic with and nihilism, this was indeed a worthy winner, and I’ve no doubt it’ll go on to even greater things. Anyway, here’s a snap I took after I popped out for a celebratory drink with director Ben Wheatley, main star Robin Hill and David Schaal (Uncle Eric in the film – you’ll recognize him as ‘Taffy’ from The Office) at The Blue Posts in Rupert Street.

For those who know nothing about the film, the trailer’s here.

Down Terrace trailer

Best Documentary Award at Raindance for Tokachi Tsuchiya’s A Normal Life Please

Jasper — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:08:43 +0000

The dust has settled, the guests have all departed, and here I am sitting home alone mulling over how it all went. Yes, Raindance Film Festival is over for another year, and after a reasonably slow start, exploded into one of the busiest I’ve ever attended. As I posted last week, virtually every single screening was sold out on the Wednesday. Amazing! And it didn’t really let up after that… And what with all the late night drinking, meaning not getting home till at least 3-4am on most nights after negotiating the labyrinthine night-bus routes trying to work out how to get to my new home from various different parts of the city, I’m physically and mentally shattered. But I’m in high spirits nonetheless, as I know that I and all the other guests from Japan will be returning to our respective routines having made new friends, nurtured new ideas about the future and emerged from that great chemistry of minds that always occurs when you have creative, talented people from so many different backgrounds assembled in one place for such a reasonably long but intense period. So anyway, over the next few days, before I head down to Bristol for the Shohei Imamura retrospective at the Arnolfini, I intend to make good my original promise and actually write a bit about the festival – only not while its actually happening, of course, but by way of a series of retroactive looks at the high points of the past week or so.

One person who should be returning from Raindance very happy is Tokachi Tsuchya, proud recipient of the Best Documentary Award for A Normal Life Please (the Japanese title, Futsu no shigoto o shitai translates more directly as ‘I’d like a proper job’, a sentiment I certainly share at times!). And a much-deserved win it was too, for sure, but still a really pleasant surprise for me, as foreign language documentaries generally have to try so much harder with English language audiences, and chances for most people to see them are rare. Tsuchiya’s work was literally born out of his own blood, sweat and tears – he was assaulted several times during the making of his film, his glasses broken, cigarettes stubbed out on his hands, his camera grabbed etc, most evident during the film’s stand-out sequence when the heavies hired by the employers of truck driver Kaikura’s arrive at his mother’s funeral to intimidate him to leave his worker’s union. (I loved it when Tsuchiya said he was terrified that when the film screened in Japan, his nemesis Kudo might turn up with his gang and wreak their revenge).

Tsuchiya seemed particularly moved when he received the award, saying that not only was it his first trip to England, but also it was the first time he’d ever received an award (handed out this time by our wonderful guest and jury member, Momoko Ando). As he explained in the very animated q&a after the screening, not only did the whole concept of labour unions originate in England, but also their dark flipside in the form of Thatcher’s deregulation policies of the 1980s, which have had a profound influence on Japanese government policy, hence the large number of people working themselves to death in Japan and freelancers like Kaikura busting his guts for a mind-boggling 300 hours a month for really only the most basic of wages – I think his monthly take home pay was less than the equivalent of around 1500 pounds. The film’s airing was particularly timely in the UK, in light of our current economic situation necessitating severe economic belt tightening all round, specifically in the public sector (though I can tell you from my own situation as a freelance writer, pay rates have dropped so low that I might as well be working at MacDonalds) and the recent contraversial announcement by the postal workers union that they’re about to go on strike. One really gets the impression that the whole free market system that’s been pushed so far over the past few decades, in which the number agencies, sub-contractors, consultancy firms, advisors etc involved in every industry has expanded so much and the people at the bottom of the pile actually doing the work pushed to ever longer hours in increasingly poor working conditions, is reaching breaking point, and one has to wonder where it’s all heading. Tsuchiya’s film provoked a lot of discussion while exposing a particularly ugly side of Japanese industry that is near unbelievable for one of the richest countries in the world. I really hope more people get a chance to see it. It’s about as vital a piece of filmmaking as it gets.

I should also say a big thanks at this juncture to Yuri Kubota and those kind folks at Nippon Connection for preparing a subtitled version of this for festival screenings. This is a film that really needs to be seen by as many people as possible. I grabbed a pretty interesting interview with Tsuchiya-san too, which will appear on Midnight Eye sometime in the not so distant future, while in the meantime Japanese readers might be interested in taking a look at the film’s homepage. For now however, keep your eye out for other posts here in the not so distant future about some of the other titles we screened.

Mid-Raindance update, only 3 more days to go….

Jasper — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:01:56 +0000

Promises, promises, promises… Yes, I have promised much and delivered very little in the way of regular updates these past days since Raindance began – in fact, absolutely nothing at all beyond the odd tweet or two. I’d intended to do daily postings about my impressions on a number of films, including Down Terrace, Love Exposure and Until the Light Takes Us, but it’s been just so hectic, I’ve barely managed more than five minutes in front of the computer this past week, and then only to fend off urgent emails. Well, once life gets back to normal again, I’ll come back to these films I mentioned and my impressions on them, as I’d imagine most of these will be getting some sort of release, or will be travelling on to further festivals. They’re all bloody brilliant anyway.

For now, just a few vague titbits about the events of the last few days. We’ve had more Japanese guests than ever this year – Yumiko Beppu (from the Peaches shorts programme), Tokachi Tsuchiya (A Normal Life Please), Yasunobu Takahashi (Locked Out), Sachi Hamano and Kuninori Yamazaki (Lily Festival) and of course, Momoko Ando, who’s here premiering her first feature with us, Kakera – A Piece of Our Life. James Iha, ex-Smashing Pumpkins, was also here to talk about his work on the soundtrack (he also scored Linda Linda Linda), though he’s already jetted back to New York. And Tom Mes, my Midnight Eye buddy, is also here. So all in all, its been a pretty hectic time, but great fun, nonetheless.

Audience attendances at this year’s festival have been unpredictable, to say the least. Every film on Wednesday night was sold out – even I couldn’t get a ticket for Until the Light Takes Us, and I programmed it! Well, I’ve seen the film before of course, but I’d have been interested to hear the q&a, which by all accounts was pretty animated. But it was particularly exciting that Kakera was sold out. As I’ve said, this was the world premiere of Momoko’s first film, and we were all very excited about how well the film went down, and highly positive about where it’s going to go next. The q&a afterwards was really fun, and we all bounded off euphorically down to the Phonenix Arts Club afterwards to celebrate.

There’s already some press online on the Japanese website Cinema Today about the focus on Japanese Women Directors this year. I spent the afternoon interviewing Sachi Hamano for Midnight Eye yesterday afternoon, and had one of the most fascinating discussions ever. Some might know her name, as one of the most prolific makers of pink film in Japan – which would probably make her one of the most prolific directors in the world. But what is most amazing is that she is essentially the first woman in Japan who has been able to maintain a career solely as a film director, and for over four decades. Her stories about what a rough time she had of things when she started in the industry, as part of Wakamatsu Productions were really amazing. The film she’s here with, Lily Festival, went down really well, and the q&a after was animated and really fascinating – she’s a real pro about this sort of thing, none of the mumbling incoherence we get from most Japanese directors. I was amazed that Lily Festival hasn’t even had a proper release in Japan, because the cinema owners all told her “who wants to see a film about the sex lives of a lot of old ladies”. Well, its a damn funny film, and Mickey Curtis is simply outstanding in it. She really is an amazing person to have at any festival, and I hope one day pretty soon she receives the recognition she is due for her achievements in Japanese cinema.

Anyway, off to the next screening of Kakera now, so must dash. Sorry, no pix today! Those in London, be sure to come to A Normal Life Please tomorrow – it is an incredible documentary, and the q&a after promises to be something really special.

Japanese Films at 17th Raindance Festival, London

Jasper — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:18:44 +0000

Event: 17th Raindance Film Festival
Venue: Apollo Cinema, 19 Lower Regent Street, London SW1Y 4LR
When: 30th September – 11th October, 2009.

This year’s Way Out East section at Raindance contains a special focus on Japanese Women Directors. For more information on this year’s Raindance program, have a look at the post Titles Announced for London’s Raindance Film Festival.

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Japan Times article online: Women who love to shoot: A rising tide of women film directors in Japan gets festival treatment

Jasper — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:51:34 +0000

Sachi Hamano's Lily Festival

My article on the new wave of Japanese women filmmakers is now online on the Japan Times website, just in time to tie in with my Raindance programme, as is my interview with Atsuko Ohno, organiser of Peaches festival, from which we’re screening 3 films. Thankfully, someone at the paper came up with a decent title for the piece, because I’d been racking my brains all year, not just for this article, but for a general angle for the Raindance focus as well. I mean, how do you sell this idea? You either go the Orientalist route, say, something like “Cameras and Kimonos”, “The Chrysanthemum and the Camera”,”Not Just Cherry Blossoms” or something similarly banal, or take the condescendingly sexist approach – “Japanese Sisters are Doing it For Themselves”, “Girls in Film” … you catch my drift.

After all, should we be really surprised that women have been the guiding hand behind some of the most interesting Japanese films of the past few years? Is it really different from the situation here in the UK? I mean, I was looking through this year’s London Film Festival line-up this year, and there seemed to be a fair few woman directors listed there. Are films by women so different from those by men?

Well, these are all discussion points of course, but a couple of facts remain. Firstly, I don’t think I could have put together a 6-slot focus on Japanese women directors quite so easily, say, ten years ago. Secondly, I gave a talk about this very subject at the Japan Foundation UK last summer, and someone came up to me afterwards and said that when she told her friend she was off to a lecture on Japanese women directors, her friend said “ That will be a cosy ten minutes then” – it seems a lot of people, at least in this country, have assumptions about the roles of and opportunities for women in Japanese society that a more than cursory look at the facts would overturn. Thirdly, I should point out that it wasn’t really particularly hard to find enough films for it this year. I went through the usual procedures of drawing up a shortlist of the best titles of the past year, and half of the directors happened to be women, so it was just a case of adding some older names to the mix, of women who’ve been in the industry long enough to remember the days when their gender was an issue, such as Sachi Hamano and Naomi Kawase, and the programme pretty much formed itself.

The fact is though, this section could have been much bigger – there were plenty of other suitable titles out there from the last year, like Tsuki Inoue’s Autumn Adagio, covered recently by Tom on Midnight Eye, Satoko Yokoyama’s Bare Essence of Life, playing Vancouver and London film festivals very soon (I personally didn’t like it, but I know it has its fans), or Shimako Sato’s recent cult fantasy K20 Legend of the Mask, which certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of a “woman’s picture”. It would also have been nice to delve back in time and add some historical landmarks, like Kinuyo Tanaka’s films, which have hardly been shown at all in recent years, although locating prints and negotiating affordable screening fees was something of an issue here.

Its obvious though, that if one wanted to do a fuller retrospective on Japanese women filmmakers, there’s no shortage of material to draw upon. It’s probably the right time to do it too, because it seems obvious to me that if recent years are anything to go by, future Japanese film programmes will feature an equal mix of male and female directors without any such need for making an issue about it.

Anyway, as the fest draws ever nearer, I should mention that we’ll have a healthy showing of guests to accompany this Japanese section; Yumiko Beppu, director of Csikspost from the Peaches selection has said she’ll be over, as will Sachi Hamano, whom I’ve written lots about in my book Behind the Pink Curtain, and her scriptwriter for Lily Festival, Kuninori Yamazaki – I’m really looking forward to talking to these guys. Also Yasunobu Takahashi, director of Locked Out, and Tokachi Tsuchiya, of A Normal Life Please. But most exciting, is that we’re getting the world premiere of Kakera, and not only will director Momoko Ando be over, but the musician who scored her film too – James Iha, best known for his stellar guitar work for Smashing Pumpkins. It all promises to be quite the party.

Titles Announced for London’s Raindance Film Festival, 30 September – 11 October 2009

Jasper — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:01:24 +0000

Love Exposure

I’ve been champing at the bit over the past few weeks waiting to announce the titles being screened at this year’s Raindance, but now I’m just about to do it, it seems the programme announcement might be overshadowed by another piece of Raindance-related news, namely the banning of this year’s festival trailer. Don’t want to dwell too much on this, as the powers that be have given their reasons in a letter that can be read here. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think this represents something of a sense-of-humour failure from the guys who once had us all singing along “Baba, baba, baba ba, bababa” before the screenings started, and fails to view the trailer in the spirit intended. Anyway, I’ve written already in my Grotesque post of August 19th about the futility of censorship in the internet age, so to prove my point, I’ll redirect any potentially interested parties to it here. I’d be interested if anyone has any opinions on this matter.

Anyway, the full schedule has yet to go online, but for now I just want spill the beans about the films I’ve been involved in selecting (this is my website, after all…) Most of these are in the Japanese section, though I also brought a couple of other titles to the attention of the festival. In the run up to the main event, I hope to give you a bit more information on at least some of these. There’s some brilliant stuff playing this year, so hope to see as many of you there as possible.

Japanese Women Filmmakers at Raindance

Since 2002, Raindance Film Festival has continued in its strong support for Japanese filmmaking, with its Way Out East section the largest annual showcase for new Japanese cinema in the United Kingdom, screening at least ten recent features and documentaries annually. The 17th Raindance Festival, held between 30 September – 11 October 2009, this year turns its spotlight on the rising tide of women filmmakers in Japan, with a special selection of five features and one shorts program from some of the country’s most exciting talent.

Kakera - A Piece of Our Life

Director Momoko Ando will be in attendance to introduce the World Premiere of her debut feature, A PIECE OF OUR LIFE – KAKERA -. The film, scored by Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, is a touching portrait of a romantic relationship between Haru, a college student whose relationship with her self-centred boyfriend is going nowhere, and Riko, a bisexual medical artist who makes prosthetic body parts. Born in 1982, Ando is the daughter of the acclaimed actor-director Eiji Okuda and the sister of rising starlet Sakura Ando, who features in two other films in the Way out East section, LOVE EXPOSURE and AIN’T NO TOMORROWS. A former student of the Slade School of Fine Art, her return to London to present her new film and serve as one of the festival’s Jury Members promises to be an unforgettable experience.

Also in attendance will be Sachi Hamano, the most prolific female director in Japan with over 400 films to her name, mainly in the genre of the erotic pink film. She will be here to present her 2001 non-pink title LILY FESTIVAL, a comedy drama in which the inhabitants of a residential home for women, aged between 69 and 91, find their passions rekindled when the first male resident moves in amongst them, a 75-year-old lothario with a charming manner and a colourful past. Hamano will be accompanied by LILY FESTIVAL’s screenwriter Kuninori Yamazaki.

Ain't No Tomorrows

Yuki Tanada’s debut feature MOON AND CHERRY played to great aplomb at Raindance in 2006. Her most recent film, AIN’T NO TOMORROWS, is a multi-threaded drama portraying the tangled emotional dynamics of a group of six highschoolers as they reach the age of sexual awareness.

Hotaru

The critically-garlanded Naomi Kawase emerged as the vanguard for the new wave of women filmmakers in Japan after becoming the youngest winner of Caméra d’Or award for best new director at Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for her film SUZAKU. Her feature THE MOURNING FOREST received the Grand Prix at the same festival in 2007, while this year she received the Golden Coach Award for life achievement. Raindance will be screening the new 2009 edit of her rarely seen 2001 film HOTARU, a naturalistically-shot romantic drama between a stripper and traditional craftsman played out against the four seasons in the scenic Nara region where Kawase lives.

Mime-Mime

Yukiko Sode’s MIME-MIME (2008) was one of the discoveries of last year’s Pia Film Festival, launched in 1977 to promote new talent in the world of independent filmmaking. An eccentric portrait of a fractious young woman, Makoto, who lives alone, has a relationship with her mother and sister that borders on downright hostility and plays dangerous sexual games with her married former high-school teacher, it is a distinctive and promising debut.

Raindance will also present a program of three short films from the PEACHES FESTIVAL, an annual event now in its third year organised by Atsuko Ohno (the producer of Raindance Best Feature winner in 2004, MAREBITO: THE STRANGER FROM AFAR, directed by Takashi Shimizu) in conjunction with the Film School of Tokyo to promote first-time women directors. The films are EMERGER, BUNNY IN A HOVEL and CSIKSPOST.

Alongside this year’s special focus on Women Directors, Raindance will feature UK premiers of five other recent Japanese titles, including the epic LOVE EXPOSURE, an unpredictable and near indescribable tour-de-force from maverick director Sion Sono (SUICIDE CIRCLE, EXTE), which won the FIPRESCI Prize and Caligari Film Award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and the audience award at the New York Asian Film Festival.

Lalapipo

Following on from the successful screenings last year of Miki Satoshi’s ADRIFT IN TOKYO and TURTLES ARE SURPRISINGLY FAST SWIMMERS, comes the director’s latest comic romp INSTANT SWAMP. With a script by Tetsuya Nakashima (KAMIKAZE GIRLS, MEMORIES OF MATSUKO), Masayuki Miyano’s LALAPIPO offers an uproarious and vibrant comic portrait of those at the heart of Japan’s outlandish sex industry.

Vacation

In Hajime Kadoi’s startling drama VACATION, a middle-aged prison guard on death row volunteers to act as a “supporter” during the execution of a condemned prisoner, in order to receive a week’s break from work to go on honeymoon with a bride he barely knows, while in Yasunobu Takahashi’s LOCKED OUT, a six-year-old boy crosses paths with a man on the run and besieged by violent visions.

Tokachi Tsuchiya’s eye-popping documentary A NORMAL LIFE PLEASE blows the lid on the Japanese government’s gradual easing of labour regulations as an overworked truck driver and his family are menaced by a yakuza gang hired by his own employers after he joins his workers union, while the insightful US-Japanese co-production of BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO looks at Japan’s relationship to the insect world.

A Normal Life Please

Outside of the Way Out East section, the Homegrown UK strand will showcase great British filmmaking talent, including the European Premiere of DOWN TERRACE “Ken Loach meets The Sopranos”- attended by Director Ben Wheatley and cast Julia Deakin (HOT FUZZ, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, SPACED) and David Schaal (CLUBBED, KIDULTHOOD, THE OFFICE). The Documentary Strand includes contentious films such as PLAYING COLUMBINE by Danny Ledonne, which raises moral questions surrounding the shoot to kill video games inspired by the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US provides a fascinating look at the violence and scandal that rocked the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the early 90s. Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto will make a rare appearance to DJ at the post-screening party.

Until the Light Takes Us

Sitting on this year’s stellar jury is: Riz Ahmed (Shifty, The Road To Guantanamo), writer/director Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge, In The Loop), Peter Bradshaw, film critic (The Guardian); actress Kerry Fox (Bright Star, Shallow Grave); director Momoko Ando (Kakera); Billy Childish: artist, musician, poet, writer, filmmaker; Christine Langan, Creative Director, BBC Films; writer and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare At Goats, Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes); Jamie Graham – Assistant Editor, Total Film; Julia Brown – Commercial Director, Apollo Cinemas; Producer Andy Williams and legendary musician/actor Tom Waits.

The festival will be held at the Apollo Cinema, Regent Street, London, between 30 Sept – 11 October 2009.

Tickets, festival passes and more details are all on the Raindance website.

Midnight Eye Latest Update

Jasper — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:41:34 +0000

Our 117th update, no less, since we kicked off the site back in 2001, and again, a slightly sex-themed one, with one of the most interesting voices from Japan’s new wave of women director talking about her new film, and a Roland Domenig’s latest installment in his highly informative look at the sex education genre.

There’s also details on a competition we’re running at the end of this post in conjunction with the BFI’s Nagisa Oshima season, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Hope you enjoy the read!

INTERVIEW: Yuki Tanada

Jasper Sharp interviews one of the leading lights of the new generation of Japanese filmmakers, director of such widely praised films as Moon and Cherry and Ain’t No Tomorrows.

(Just to give something of a taster for this year’s Raindance, I can now exclusively reveal that Yuki Tanada’s latest film, Ain’t No Tomorrows, is one of the titles by Japanese Women Directors playing at this year’s Raindance Festival. I hope to get a post out with the full lineup in the coming week.)

Sakura Ando in Ain't No Tomorrows

FEATURE: A History of Sex Education Films in Japan, Part 3

Our in-depth look continues in part three: the seiten films, in which we run into some very familiar names from Japanese film history. By Roland Domenig.

History of Sex Education Films in Japan

Midnight Eye Competition – Nagisa Oshima Retrospective Tickets

Starting August 28 and throughout September and October, the BFI Southbank in London will celebrate the astounding films of Japan’s foremost modern master Nagisa Oshima, with a complete retrospective of his films. The director spearheaded Japan’s new wave and in the 60s and 70s was as famous and influential as Godard. Plus a rare opportunity to see a selection of his television work.

As a centrepiece of the season the BFI will release In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Corrida, 1976), which is considered Oshima’s masterpiece and one of the most erotic films ever made. The political repression in the Japan of 1936 serves as a backdrop to this sensuous exploration of sexual dependency, which is based on Japan’s most infamous sex-crime.

In the Realm of the Senses opens on 28 August at BFI Southbank and selected cinemas nationwide. For more information, visit http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/nagisa_oshima.

And now for the competition:

To coincide with its Nagisa Oshima season, the BFI is offering two pairs of tickets to see The Realm of the Senses during its run at the BFI Southbank, which will go to the first two people who can correctly name the first ever film treatment of the Sada Abe Incident – so we want the name of the film, the year, and its director please. Send your answers in to editorial@midnighteye.com.

Obviously, this competition is only open to UK residents, and if you’re not going to be anywhere near London during September, then there’s no point applying, as you’ll only be depriving someone else of the chance to see this film in all its uncut full-screen splendour.