[KineJapan] San Sebastian

Roger Macy macyroger at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Sep 26 20:22:01 EDT 2015


The SanSebastian film festival finishes this evening. At time of writing, with one day’svoting still to come, Koreeda’s ‘Our Little Sister’ is out in front for the€50,000 audienceaward.Otherwise,Japanese films were confined to the retrospectiveon independent Japanese films since the year 2000, as was announced previouslyon this site.With respectto the numbers, it included 35 films, all subtitled in english andspanish.  For seven screenings, thespanish subtitles were substituted with basque. All films had at least two screenings with a few having a thirdscreening.  In accordance with Festivalpractice, no screenings started before 1600. Since the screenings were spread over the city, this meant that even themost devoted viewer could not see all the films. I could only come for three daysbut was happy to catch a few films previously unseen.  The distribution of Japanese independentfilms is very patchy and, although I cannot speak for every European country,many of these have not previously been seen in theatres in Spain and perhapsonly for one brief tour, or, in some cases, not at all, in the UK.The Festivalhas produced a book to accompany the retrospective, with spanish and englishtext.  ‘Nuevo Cine Independiente Japonés2000-2015’ edited by Shozo ICHIYAMA, is in what I’ll call their ‘B’ format -that is it’s like ‘Japón en Negro’ in format, not like their books on Naruseand Oshima.  Although it’s slimmer thanthe 2008 ‘Negro’ book, I think in many ways it’s an improvement.  The stills, which appear in the spanish sectiononly, are in colour.  The english feelsmore readable.  That’s mainly becausethey’ve dropped the filmographies that, these days are better provided on the internet,and included a review of each of the thirty-five films, by a variety ofwriters. Since I haven’t spotted anything negative in any of them, perhaps Ishould call them ‘championing’, rather than critical pieces.  Nevertheless, they stand as often the onlywrite-up on these films in spanish, or in english - only eleven of them were,for example, reviewed in Midnight Eye.These arepreceded by essays by Ichiyama, on Jishu Eiga, and by Chris Fujiwara,who rose to the task of identifying thematic commonalities in independentJapanese film, producing something more readable and insightful than the taskwould indicate.San Sebastianstaged a press conferencechaired by Roberto Cueto with Ichiyama and directors, Makoto SHINOZAKI andShinya TSUKAMOTO.  Most of theinformation in the press conference is better available in the book but Ilearned at least one thing from the conference. There had been talk of the self-financing needed for independent filmsin Japan and the inevitable example came up of Wakamatsu sinking everything heowned into house that was destroyed for ‘United Red Army’.  But Tsukamoto-san managed to point out in a differentpart of the conference that he had sunk all that he owned and all thathe inherited from his father, who died during the production of his ‘Fires onthe Plain.Since that isshowing tomorrow morning at 10.00 tomorrow morning here in London at theRaindance Film Festival - nine hours from now, I’ve sunk my £9.75 into thisventure and better get myself to bed.http://calendar.raindancefestival.org/films/fires-on-the-plainRoger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20150927/faec5392/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
KineJapan mailing list
KineJapan at lists.osu.edu
https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan


More information about the KineJapan mailing list