Thursday, March 12, 2009
Japanese Films at Bradford Fest / Skip City International D-Cinema Festival
Last year I mentioned how Nakajima Ryô's This World Of Ours made its way to the Bradford International Film Festival after I had praised it back in 2007.
This year's edition of BIFF (March 13~28) features even more titles for those of you in the UK or in neighbouring countries looking for a big-screen fix of J-content.
BIFF programmer Tom Vincent thanked me yesterday for the "invaluable" information on this blog and how it motivated him to track down some of these films. Always very glad to hear this kind of feedback. Here are the titles:
Naked of Defenses (also see my Midnight Eye Best of 2008 list and my article on Pia's 2008 winners)
Mime-Mime (Also see Pia link above. Sode Yukiko is one of Japan's young female directors to watch, and not just because she's beautiful -- I thought she was an actress when I first saw her at PFF years ago.)
Yakuza Eiga (wrote a bit about it as part of my nouvelle tsunami coverage here)
Wings of Defeat (Spoke about this film in my first podcast back in June 2007. Also see a new interview with director Risa Morimoto from last week here).
Megumi (wrote a bit about this last April while covering the animated film about Megumi's tragic life).
In local festival news, I'm pleased to announce I've been hired by Skip City International D-Cinema Festival (July 10~20) as a member of the selection committee. I will be helping to discover new talent for inclusion in the newly established section for independent Japanese feature films. Very much looking forward to it.
Skip City trivia 1: Why "Skip"? Saitama Kawaguchi Intelligent Park. The digital studio facilities there are quite amazing.
Skip City trivia 2: The empty lot to the north of the grounds has been used for film shoots, most recently 20th Century Boys: Chapter Two - The Last Hope. The limo assassination sequence (one of the film's highlights) was shot along the Visual Plaza's main strip.
See my collected Skip City posts here.
8 comments:
...now there's something I'd like to learn about : where do
festival organizers get their info, where do they gather, how
can / do we share stuff we hear about that we can't be
certain others know about? sites cover a certain amount,
but I'm tracking some stuff I'm not seeing anywhere yet...
congrats on your assignment, by the way.
Speaking of Yakuza Eiga, it's been aired last month on French-German tv, I can say it's more about Yakuza in movies than yakuza films genre (some feedbacks).
And congrats too! I hope you'll publish some details about this experience at the Skip City Fest.
Thanks to both. Hopefully the next Nakajima, Ichii, Inoue, Chikuma or Sode will emerge from this endeavor.
I didn't have time to follow-up but I'm curious how Yakuza Eiga went down at the Kyoto fest, in front of a Japanese audience.
Congrats, Jason. Now you can help us. Do you know who's repping the foreign rights for NAKED OF DEFENSES? I saw it in Berlin and liked it, but need to show it to my partners via a screener before we can book it.
I'll send you an email about that. Naked of Defenses is a good one -- it caught me off guard.
How was Yubari? Any plans for a report on your blog?
Hi Jason,
My film "God's Ears" will be at Skip City so am very happy to be able to get out there for the occasion. My biggest influences as a director have come from the Japanese (Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, etc.,) so feels appropriate or at least satisfying. All the best!
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comment. It's funny you mention that -- I was just helping the festival to translate the names of your cast into Japanese.
Been a John Saxon fan for a long time.
Hope to see your film at SC.
Hope to see you as well Jason.
And I am actually as I write this finishing the dialogue list for the film's subtitles! Last minute thing I didn't expect.
And John is a great guy next to being the great actor.
See you soon.
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