[KineJapan] San Sebastian

Roger Macy macyroger at yahoo.co.uk
Sun Sep 27 13:00:34 EDT 2015


Thanks, Jose, for reminding me of 'The Boy and the Beast'.
I see that 'Our Little Sister' has indeed won the audience award.  I wonder how the €50,000 is shared, if at all, between director and producers.  I wonder especially as the other audience prize, to their favorite European film, went to JIA Jang-ke's 'Mountains May Depart', which has a Japanese co-producer.
http://www.sansebastianfestival.com/2015/news/1/5623/in
I see some irony.  It would be too cynical to define a Jishu-eiga as a film project no Japanese producer will touch, but it's certainly a film made without a producer.
European films at festivals may go through several rounds of funding before completion.  We have remarked before about the dearth of independent production funds in Japan so Jia seems at least doubly blessed in having apparently found one.
But anyway, congratulations to both films and their makers.
Roger(An earlier, identical version of this mis-fired and only went to Jose, as I didn't get his posting to the list.  That won't be the only time this week I've seen a reply to a posting I've never seen.)

 
    ----- Forwarded Message -----
  From: Jose Montaño <mostro.films at gmail.com>
 To: Roger Macy <macyroger at yahoo.co.uk>; Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum <kinejapan at lists.osu.edu> 
 Sent: Sunday, 27 September 2015, 9:19
 Subject: Re: [KineJapan] San Sebastian
   
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 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

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-- 
Jose Montañoホセ・モンターニョCine y cultura japonesa:
https://eigavision.wordpress.com/https://upf.academia.edu/JoseMontaño



   
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