[KineJapan] San Sebastian

[Jose Montaño]

Thank you for that brilliant report on the festival.
I'll just add that apart, from ‘Our Little Sister’, the official
competition also included 'The Boy and the Beast'. This is remarkable since
San Sebastian has been a conservative festival, perhaps too sensitive to
some old fashioned film criticism gurus in Spanish media, not especially
open regarding to animation. The current chairman, Jose Luis Rebordinos,
has a long experience as director of a genre festival like the Fantastic
and Horror Film Week of San Sebastián. He also was the coordinator of the
journal Nosferatu (all its numbers here:
https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/39966), a great contribution to the
spreading of knowledge around cinema with some volumes devoted to Japanese
cinema. Looks like his hand is being fundamental in the way the festival
is, step by step, breaking with its conservative bias and introducing other
forms to understand cinema.


On 27 September 2015 at 09:22, Roger Macy <macyroger at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> The San Sebastian film festival finishes this evening. At time of writing,
> with one day’s voting still to come, Koreeda’s ‘Our Little Sister’ is out
> in front for the €50,000 audience award
> <http://www.sansebastianfestival.com/2015/awards_and_jury_members/1/4961/in>
> .
> Otherwise, Japanese films were confined to the retrospective
> <http://www.sansebastianfestival.com/2015/sections_and_films/thematic_retrospective/1/4954/in>
> on independent Japanese films since the year 2000, as was announced
> previously on this site.
> With respect to the numbers, it included 35 films, all subtitled in
> english and spanish.  For seven screenings, the spanish subtitles were
> substituted with basque.  All films had at least two screenings with a
> few having a third screening.  In accordance with Festival practice, no
> screenings started before 1600.  Since the screenings were spread over
> the city, this meant that even the most devoted viewer could not see all
> the films. I could only come for three days but was happy to catch a few
> films previously unseen.  The distribution of Japanese independent films
> 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
> perhaps only for one brief tour, or, in some cases, not at all, in the UK.
> The Festival has produced a book to accompany the retrospective, with
> spanish and english text.  ‘Nuevo Cine Independiente Japonés 2000-2015’
> 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 Naruse and
> Oshima.  Although it’s slimmer than the 2008 ‘Negro’ book, I think in
> many ways it’s an improvement.  The stills, which appear in the spanish
> section only, are in colour.  The english feels more readable.  That’s
> mainly because they’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 of writers. Since I haven’t spotted
> anything negative in any of them, perhaps I should call them ‘championing’,
> rather than critical pieces.  Nevertheless, they stand as often the only
> write-up on these films in spanish, or in english - only eleven of them
> were, for example, reviewed in Midnight Eye.
> These are preceded by essays by Ichiyama, on *Jishu Eiga*, and by Chris
> Fujiwara, who rose to the task of identifying thematic commonalities in
> independent Japanese film, producing something more readable and insightful
> than the task would indicate.
> San Sebastian staged a press conference
> <http://www.sansebastianfestival.com/tv/6/217/in> chaired by Roberto
> Cueto with Ichiyama and directors, Makoto SHINOZAKI and Shinya TSUKAMOTO.
> Most of the information in the press conference is better available in the
> book but I learned at least one thing from the conference.  There had
> been talk of the self-financing needed for independent films in Japan and
> the inevitable example came up of Wakamatsu sinking everything he owned
> into house that was destroyed for ‘United Red Army’.  But Tsukamoto-san
> managed to point out in a different part of the conference that he had sunk
> all that he owned *and* all that he inherited from his father, who died
> during the production of his ‘Fires on the Plain.
> Since that is showing tomorrow morning at 10.00 tomorrow morning here in
> London at the Raindance Film Festival - nine hours from now, I’ve sunk my
> £9.75 into this venture and better get myself to bed.
> http://calendar.raindancefestival.org/films/fires-on-the-plain
> Roger
>
>
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>


-- 
Jose Montaño
ホセ・モンターニョ
*Cine y cultura japonesa:*
*https://eigavision.wordpress.com/ <https://eigavision.wordpress.com/>*


*https://upf.academia.edu/JoseMontaño
<https://upf.academia.edu/JoseMonta%C3%B1o>*
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