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20
Apr

Nippon Connection officially came to an end on Sunday evening, although you’d hardly know it. As I write, there are currently still around 40+ guests hanging around Frankfurt trying to work out how and when they’re going to get home, myself included. On the one hand, there’s a kind of feeling that the festival is still ongoing, minus the films of course, as everyone rallies round to make the best of a bad situation, huddled around in bars trying to ignore the obvious realities of the situation. On the other, as boredom sets in, it’s only a matter of time before we all get sick of the site of one another, tired of saying our final farewells only to find everyone back at the festival centre next day awaiting new updated information about our imminent departures.

Of course, things could be a lot worse. If the volcano had blown a few days earlier, there would have been no guests, no prints and basically no festival, hardly a fitting celebration for Nippon Connection’s tenth year. I’m actually in a better situation than most of the others here who need to get back to Japan or North America, because in the worst case scenario, I can always hitchhike up to Calais and stand on the beach, as in Atonement, amassed with all the other Brits awaiting repatriation. And we should spare a thought for the poor jishu eiga director who has been grounded for the past 5 days in Istanbul, where he was meant to be transferring flight…

I have to say, I’ve been fairly in the dark about the whole situation until today. I’d not read any newspaper coverage nor seen any TV reports about the volcano in the English language. The only screens I’ve been looking at have been filled with Japanese films. I knew over the weekend that the whole incident was going to be a damn inconvenience, but buried my head in the sand as I realised that there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it and didn’t want it to affect my enjoyment of the festival. Now it looks like I’m here for a couple more days, at least I’ve got my laptop, internet access, and a few DVDs to watch, so things could be a lot worse.

Nippon Connection Audience Award winner Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror, directed by Shinsuke Sato and produced by Production IG

Well, that brings me to the festival, which is, after all, the reason we are all here, and though we’re all going to look back and laugh in a year or so on the events that overtook the tenth Nippon Connection, the festival was memorable for other reasons too, namely the films. This year, I was accorded the honour of sitting on the jury for the Nippon Digital Award, alongside Bernt Brehmer and Dr Roland Domenig. It is the first year Nippon Connection has had a competition for the digital selection, which has got stronger and stronger over the years and at present provides the best showcase anywhere in the world for some of the most important discoveries in the world of Japanese indie filmmaking, documentary and experimental animation, courtesy of the pioneering efforts of programmers Alex Zahlten and Christiane Borchert. Basically, if you’re into the edgier, more innovative side of Japanese film, Nippon Connection’s annual selection is second to none. This meant, however, that I had to spend much of the fest in the digital screening room, so never got the chance to watch any of the more mainstream fare playing on the big screen. Some of these I’d seen before, but I didn’t catch any of the films that got the audience award this year: in third place was Hitoshi Matsumoto’s Symbol; second was Shuichi Okita’s The Chef of South Polar; with the main prize going to Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror, a 3DCG animation from Production I.G. directed by Shinsuke Sato – well, I never saw that one coming, but the Nippon Connection audience has always been an unpredictable lot.

Noriko Eguchi in Kota Yoshida's Yuriko’s Aroma

There was some great stuff playing in the Nippon Digital selection however, including Daishi Matsunaga’s documentary on the bizarre transgender performance artist Pyuupiru, which you can read all about on Midnight Eye and Yu Irie’s 8000 Miles Part 2: Girls Rappers, which I mentioned in my Yubari report. However, we were all particularly impressed with Kota Yoshida’s Yuriko’s Aroma, a slick and sexy comedy-drama starring Noriko Eguchi of Moon and Cherry fame, playing a not dissimilar role as an aromatherapist with a particularly sensitive olfactory organ who develops an unhealthy obsession with her employer’s sweaty teenage nephew.

Pyuupiru, in Daishi Matsunaga's film of the same name

It wasn’t the winner, but we gave it a special mention anyway, and hopefully I’ll find a way of bringing it to the UK before the year’s out. The man of the moment, though, was Tetsuaki Matsue, who impressed me a lot about ten years ago with his promising documentary debut, Annyong Kimchee, detailing his own “coming out” to his friends about his Korean ancestry. I’d always felt that Matsue had subsequently rather coasted along on his talents, but it seems he’s finally come of age this year. It’s true, his Annyong Yumika, also in competition this year, his portrait of the legendary AV and pink actress Yumika Hayashi, who tragically died in 2005 and who is perhaps best known with foreign audiences for her role in Shinja Imaoka’s Lunchbox (2003), wasn’t a million miles away from his usual style. It manifested both the strengths and weaknesses of Matsue’s previous films, though it was engrossing enough, and for those who don’t know much about Japan’s sex film industry and its surprise hidden links with Korea, it was certainly a revelation. Still, it wasn’t quite winning material, so it’s just as well that Matsue also had another film in competition, the near work of genius that is Live Tape. I’m going to be covering this film in a whole lot more detail on Midnight Eye very soon, but for the moment, the nutshell description is this is a single-shot film of the musician Kenta Maeno (also at the fest) as he wanders around Kichijoji performing with his guitar. It’s actually a whole lot more than that too, but basically we were all agreed this was the most innovative, refreshing and inspiring uses of a single DV tape we’d seen in a long, long time and a much-deserved winner. Matsue’s prize is the subtitles of his next film provided completely free of charge, courtesy of the Japanese Visualmedia Translation Academy (JVTA). It should be finished before the year’s out – there’ll be more info on this nearer its release, but for now I’ll just say it is going to be set around Tokyo’s celebrated otaku enclave of Akihabara.

Star of the show: Kenta Maeno in Tetsuaki Matsue's Live Tape

Unfortunately I didn’t get my camera out for any of the festival, so you’ll have to make do with stills of some of the films I’ve mentioned for now. Anyway, this is me signing off for the day. Can’t get back to London for the Takahiko Iimura films, but it doesn’t really matter as he can’t make it either, which leaves me with no other choice other than to pop out for a coffee and a Bratwurst, and try to amuse myself while I await further news on my travel plans.

Posted at 13:08 on 20 April 2010

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15
Mar

Go Go Yubari!

Yubari International Film Festival 2010

So here I am once more, seated in my customary position somewhere in the murky depths of south-east London staring at my face partially reflected in the monitor of my Mac. Wasn’t it always thus? It seems so, the past few weeks now reduced to a fragmented fever dream of regurgitated sense memories; floating faces from a previous life, flashing neon signs of alien characters, the repetitive blare of electronic melodies echoing through my subconscious. But no – the paper trail of ticket stubs in my back pocket and appointments jotted in the pages of my diary, the unpacked suitcase overflowing with dirty laundry, DVD screeners and chirashi one-sheets, and a camera memory card full of surreptitious snapshots seem to indicate that somewhere within the blur of the past month or so, I was there, back on the other side of the world again.

The main venue, the Adire Yubari

I don’t know why I always feel the need to make such disclaimers, but yes, I had originally intended to give regular updates on my movements during this last trip to Japan, if only for my own benefit as some sort of confirmation that I was actually there as much as to jot down my impressions on current developments within the Japanese film scene. Somewhere along the way however I was absorbed into the vortex, with barely a moment to draw breath between the stream of meetings, screenings, research sessions and barroom re-acquaintances with old friends. Even sleep was a rare luxury.

Nippon Connection's Alex Zahlten in the izakaya that served as the main main post-screening meeting point

This post, then, is the first of several, I hope, in which I will attempt to set down the salient points of my stay, beginning with my first weekend at the legendary Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Hokkaido. This isn’t intended as any sort of review or festival report. You’ll be able to find these from previous years on Midnight Eye, with Eija Niskanen’s piece on last year’s here and Tom Mes’ from the one before here. No, basically this is just an excuse for my to put up some of my photos from that weekend and assemble them into some sort of narrative.

Freezing at the saturday night stove party with Eija Niskanen

I’d been in Tokyo a couple of days before flying up to Hokkaido, the evening before spent back in a bar run by a certain pink director best known for his work in the 1990s. All this meant I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep before heading to Haneda airport at some ungodly hour on the morning of Thursday 25th Feb. Turns out I needn’t have bothered rushing as the flight was delayed by several hours due to the dense fog encircling Tokyo, so several hours were spent loafing around drinking coffee and saying hellos to all the others heading up north. These included such notable luminaries as director Nobuhiro Yamashita and actor Ryo Ishibashi, both of whom were sitting on the festival jury – as well as a whole swathe of festival staff members, casts and crews of the films playing there, and numerous others drawn to the buzz of one of the high-points in the Japanese movie world’s social calendar. My own reason for going, aside from the sheer joy of being there and looking out for some decent titles to introduce to England, was to participate in a panel discussion with two other Japanese film specialist programmers, Marc Walkow (NYAFF) and Alex Zahlten (Nippon Connection), about the overseas appreciation of Japanese cinema, which all went pretty swimmingly, I thought.

Hand-painted hoarding for Carmen Comes Home

Without saying too much about the individual titles that played at this years fest, which I’ll have ample opportunity to do over the coming months, my overall impression of YIFFF was that the overall emphasis was on the fun and the films rather than glitzy red carpet posturing (the various financial difficulties suffered over the past few years, not only by the festival but the actual town itself, have been well-documented elsewhere). Outside of the festival, Yubari town was quite an experience in itself. A tiny place about an hour-and-a-half drive from Sapporo otherwise better known for its melons and its now defunct coal industry, it consisted of little more than a couple of hotels and a handful of buildings surrounded by snowy mountains and linked by a main road covered in a thick sheet of ice that made crawling between its small selection of screens, bars, eateries and karaoke joints a pretty perilous experience.

Hand-painted hoarding for Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

The other most noticeable thing about the town is that its streets are festooned with hand-painted classic film posters, both Japanese and western. This is a clearly a town that takes its cinema pretty seriously. Aside from skiing and melon farming, one can’t imagine there’s much more for people to do here other than watch films, although outside of the festival one imagines that opportunities to catch the latest releases on a big screen must be pretty limited. The eclectic programming mixed recent foreign hits such as District 9, The Hurt Locker, Sherlock Holmes and An Education and home-grown premieres like Tomoyuki Furumaya’s Bushido Sixteen and Shusuke Kaneko’s Bakamono- The Idiots with a host of modestly-budgeted jishu eiga titles, the best of which screened in the separate Off-Theatre section. The less said about the opening film, Surely Someday, the better. A puerile caper movie involving a boy band starring and directed by Shun Oguri (from Boys over Flowers, Crows ZERO), it did at least provide a welcome opportunity to catch some shut-eye. Elsewhere however, there were some great discoveries, with the premiere of Yu Irie’s 8000 Miles Part 2, the follow up to last years Off Theater winner 8000 Miles (the Japanese title Saitama Rapper gives a better indication of the film’s contents) capped off with a sprightly performance from its pert ensemble cast of girl rappers (comprised of Love Exposure’s Sakura Ando and the newcomers Maho Yamada, Fumi Sakurai, Kumiko Masuda and Mayumi Kato) providing an uplifting end to the Friday evening.

Onstage shenanigans from the cast of Saitam Rapper 2: Girl Rappers

It also soon became clear that in packing for my trip to Japan, I’d failed to appreciate just how damn cold it got in Hokkaido in March. Ok, so it wasn’t so much of an issue while watching films of course, but the walks between the various venues and post-screening drinking holes might have been a little less gruelling had I thought of bringing along a pair of gloves, at the very least. The Saturday night ‘stove party’, which followed a mind-blowing selection of ero-guro anime including Naoyuki Niiya’s revelatory kami-shibai workout, Man-Eater Mountain (Hitokui yama), was great fun, swilling down warm sake and feasting off charcoal grilled dear meat, octopus and scallops, although sadly the cold soon got the better off us and we beat a hasty retreat to the cosy Grace Karaoke bar for a lengthy singsong session.

Naoyuki Niiya's experimental kami-shibai movie Man-Eater Mountain

Christ knows what the place is like once all traces of the festival have gone, but it was clear that the locals definitely appreciated the massive influx into their town, and were the epitome of politeness and welcoming geniality. Lovely people. The cosy friendliness of the place was infectious, meaning that it was easy to rub shoulders with the other festival guests, including the highly-personable Ryo Ishibashi, and the legendary Johnny To, who generously treated all of the other guests to a farewell party at a local sushi restaurant. Yes, Yubari 2010 is a memory I am going to treasure for a long, long time, as it was one of the best film events I’ve ever attended in Japan. I pray I make it back again sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Posted at 11:49 on 15 March 2010

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