TOKYO FILMeX 2010 Wrap Story

TOKYO FILMeX 2010 wrapped last night. It was another great year and, I think, a turning point for the festival with the inaugural edition of the Next Masters Tokyo program.

Below is my FILMeX wrap article for Screen, which ran yesterday. I wanted to reproduce it here as well as it's a subscription-only piece and the workaround Google News links seem to expire in a few days.

Regarding Uchida Nobuteru's winning film Love Addiction (Fuyu no Kemono, 『ふゆの獣』), I spoke to the director and he said there is currently no domestic release planned or distribution in place. I enjoyed Love Addiction and think it would be a good title for overseas fests looking to showcase a well-acted, independently made relationship drama from Japan (the budget equaled the prize money awarded).


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Love Addiction wins top prize at Tokyo Filmex

28 November, 2010 | By Jason Gray

Two projects awarded in Next Masters programme.

Director Nobuteru Uchida’s Love Addiction (Fuyu No Kemono) won the grand prize and $11,800 (Y1m) at the conclusion of the 11th edition of Tokyo Filmex (Nov 20-28).

Love Addiction was singled out among 10 competition titles by the jury, headed by Ulrich Gregor. “Love Addiction develops its psychological drama to an extraordinary level of intensity, achieving it with very limited financial means,” said the five-member jury in a joint statement.

Love Addiction follows a pair of male and female co-workers whose romantic liaisons lead to an intense four-way confrontation. Uchida’s third independent feature screened as a world premiere.

The special jury prize and $8,000 in Kodak colour film stock was presented to director Hao Jie for rural drama Single Man. The film previously screened at San Sebastian and Vancouver.

Kazuhiro Soda’s documentary Peace picked up the audience award.

The awards ceremony closed with the Japan premiere of Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives opened the festival on the 20th.

Continuing last year’s collaboration with Shochiku studios, there were eight rarely seen classic films by Minoru Shibuya plus works by Yasujiro Ozu and Keisuke Kinoshita. The Shibuya collection is tentatively set to travel to the Berlin film festival next year.

Also featured was a mini-retrospective on Israeli director Amos Gitai, whose latest film Roses On Credit screened in competition.

This year also saw the launch of the Next Masters program. Twenty participants from across Asia and still in the early stages of their careers were invited to Tokyo for a three-day session of lectures and interaction.

Filmex directors Kanako Hayashi and Shozo Ichiyama selected eight participants to pitch their next projects to four mentors: director Hou Hsiao-hsien, British producer Simon Field, Memento Films’ Emilie Georges and Berlin talent campus manager Matthijs Wouter Knol.

The Tokyo Filmex Next Masters best project 2010 and $3,500 was awarded to Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen for his project Ilo Ilo, now in pre-production. Ilo Ilo focuses on the poignant attachment of a Singaporean family to their Filipino maid.

Simon Field commented: “Ilo Ilo showed clear talent and potential to be a moving story with international appeal.”

Represented by United Agents in the UK, Chen made the 2007 short film Ah Ma, which won a special mention at the Cannes film festival while 2010’s Lighthouse won the Kodak film school competition.

A special mention award was added to recognize a project in the early development stage, given to Malaysian director Charlotte Lim Lay Kuen’s surreal drama It Must Be A Camel.

“We look forward to our Next Masters participants completing their upcoming features and screening them in competition at our festival,” stated Hayashi.

Aside from lectures given by the mentors, master class speakers included directors Abbas Kiarostami, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Makoto Shinozaki.

Canal+ documentary featuring Sushi Typhoon talents and Rina Takeda (High Kick Girl)

Back on May 17 I wrote a post about a Canal+ documentary on Tokyo that I worked on in some degree.

I knew the program would be airing around this time in France but wasn't sure of the exact date. Thanks to a tweet by Wild Grounds that linked to a post on French-language website AsiaFilm.FR, I could watch the cinema section of Toqué de Tokyo on YouTube. I believe "toqué" means "batty," "zany," "wacky" etc. It's rare you see an adjective like that used to describe Japan...

I had been consulted on potential segments in terms of Japanese cinema subculture that would have a high enough toqué quotient. Aside from fitting well with the rest of the non-film segments (check out local personality La Carmina's blog for more on the fashion section), my intention was to recommend films and filmmakers that had a strong chance of being seen outside of Japan and that had new projects on the boil.

At the time of the first meeting with producer Peter Stuart in early January this year Sushi Typhoon were ramping up production, centered around established talents such as Nishimura Yoshihiro.

Takeda Rina's debut film High-Kick Girl! was also generating some buzz, with another martial arts flick in the works (radical departure Karate Girl / 『KG』). There would later be some synergy with Takeda joining the latest incarnation of tokusatsu TV series The Ancient Dogoo Girl (official site), directed by Nishimura and Iguchi Noboru among others (also see Twitch article).

Here's the segment, hosted by Antoine de Caunes. It's in French, naturally, but it's not hard to follow:

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TIFF wraps for another year

The Tokyo International Film Festival and TIFFCOM market have wrapped for another year. Things continue to improve at both of these events -- they've come a fair way since the early 2000s, particularly in the last few editions under Tom Yoda's chairmanship.

The above iPhone snap is from the closing ceremony yesterday (Oct. 31). You can see 98-year-old director Shindô Kaneto (awarded Special Jury Prize for Post Card / Ichimai no Hagaki 『一枚のハガキ』) on stage in his wheelchair and cool black leather jacket. There was a great amount of respect in the air, including from jury head Neil Jordan who recalled seeing a life-changing Shindô double-bill at the Berlin fest when he was 16.

TIFFCOM's project market, Tokyo Project Gathering, was quite useful to really define where Yellow Earth (see Aug. 24 entry and TPG page) needed to go, and not go, next. It's a big project but things are positive. Hope to keep posting regular updates.

With my Screen International cap on I wrote some TIFF/TIFFCOM coverage alongside our deputy Asia editor Jean Noh, who covered the market and new UniJapan Entertainment Forums (UEF), one of which I moderated. Following are links to our stories. Most of it is subscription only but some if it might be accessible through Google news or elsewhere on the web:


- "Intimate Grammar takes top prize in Tokyo, China has strong showing"

- "'Busy' TIFFCOM sees visitors and exhibitors increase"

- "Yuya Ishii picks up award as Tokyo Project Gathering wraps"

- "Joint Entertainment gets Memory Loss in Toyko"

- "TIFFCOM panelists give advice to European filmmakers in Japan"

- "Gaga adds new Kore-eda film to sales slate"

- "Local and international stars on hand as Tokyo kicks off 23rd edition"

Our editor-in-chief Mike Goodridge enjoyed his first trip to Tokyo, moderating a UEF discussion with 13 Assassins producer Jeremy Thomas just hours after he arrived. As I tweeted some days back, Miike Takashi is busy shooting the Thomas-produced 3D remake of Harakiri (new title TBA) in Kyoto.

There will also be a stack of TIFF film reviews from our chief critic Mark Adams going up soon. Good times eating, drinking and singing with the crew. On a personal note, it was great finally meeting people face to face that I had been communicating with over the net in the past year.

As far as films I saw during the festival, as usual it was a pathetic amount due to everything else going on. Aside from opening film The Social Network (superb) I chose some titles that would be hard to see on the big screen again, including two films by Turkish auteur Reha Erdem and independent Filipino drama Halaw (aka Ways of the Sea). Halaw director Sheron Dayoc will participate in TOKYO FILMeX' Next Masters Tokyo 2010 program later this month.