[KineJapan] Mabashi Wonderland Movie Festival

[Jeremy Harley]

Dear everyone,
I am starting a new festival "next month!!" in Koenji called the Mabashi
Wonderland Movie Festival.
Dates are Jan 18, 19, 20 (Fri, Sat, Sun).

I have tried to describe it below, but some clarification is surely needed
here and there, please don't hesitate to ask.

Most but not all films have English subtitles (or are in English to begin
with), but I don't know how much I'll be able be to promote this festival
in English in its first year, so please pass this along to friends and
students or anyone at all whom you think might be interested!
(prefer it's not posted on Facebook or online, if you don't mind. It's not
fully polished, perhaps.)

A more official flyer (in Japanese) will follow in the next few days.

Below are the films decided so far, which will be complemented with older
Mabashi shorts and perhaps new shorts by Mabashi directors (TBA).

*Features*:
*Diary of a Rambling Woman* (in JP with ENG subs) by Mari Terashima
*Bamseom Pirates,  Seoul Inferno* (in KR with JP and ENG subs) by Yoonsuk
Jung
*I'm Not Here *(in JP with ENG subs) by Shintaro Hihara

*Shorts programs*:
*Koki Ebata's Mabashi Movies*  (in JP)
*Chess Forum Movies *(in JP with ENG subs)

and more....

Further descriptions of the movies follow below, and you may find a
description of the original *Mabashi Movie Festival (now resting?) at the
very bottom. That festival was founded by three of us. This time, I'm doing
a different kind of festival under this new-ish name.

Dates: Jan 18, 19, 20 (Fri, Sat, Sun)
Venue: Shiroto no Ran #12 (Fudeno bldg. 2f 3-8-12 Koenji-kita Suginami-ku
Tokyo 1660002 Japan)

Hope to see you at the movies....!
peace to all,
Jeremy


●We will premiere the English-subtitled version (my translation) of *Diary
of a Rambling Woman*. Mari Terashima has been making movies for a long
time, you may be familiar with Princess Plum Pudding (1999) and Alice in
the Underworld: the Dark Märchen Show!! (2009).
Diary of a Rambling Woman is a brooding batty and uproarious self-mocking
self-documentary.

●The band in *Bamseom Pirates,  Seoul Inferno *-Bamseom Pirates - has close
ties to Koenji, especially to Shiroto no Ran (Amateur Revolt/Riot), and the
movie will be showing there for the first time, so it should be great fun.
The band's satirical lyrics jibe well with the Shiroto no Ran view on life.
The movie's garish envisioning of the band's songs has its own style, that
complements them eloquently.

 ↑Both of these are laugh out loud movies, made to be seen with people, in
public.

●*I'm Not Here* is a fiction feature shot by an employee of the film
division of an arts college. He shot in the college itself, using film
students as his actors, but the film's message is to harshly criticize the
school and its administration as it becomes more and more commercial to the
detriment of its students, a ubiquitous problem in Japan today. Unhurried
at 2 hrs 20 min, and yet completely engrossing.

●Koki Ebata might be best known for Transgender Trouble, which showed at
Yamagata in 2011, and she also filmed a daring chronicle of her boyfriend's
arrest in a protest in September 2011 entitled My Boyfriend Was Arrested!
She made 6 shorts for Mabashi over the years, all shown here. The first
three chronicle the work of the collective RLL, who were centered in and
around Shiroto no Ran. The third shows anti-nuclear protests from April
2011 through early summer of 2011. The last two are more diary-like. All
shorts are 10 min or a few seconds under, so it's an hour-long program.

●Chess Forum is a chess store where I used to work in Greenwich Village in
New York, and a number of shorts (fiction and documentary) have been made
in and about it, so I thought I'd show a few, with Japanese subtitles. It's
a last vestige of a New York that once was, watched over by the son of
Palestian refugees, and I hope we can express at least a tiny bit of what
the store is about, and hopefully transport viewers to someplace
interesting.

*The Mabashi Movie Festival was a community film festival held in “Mabashi”
(the old name for an area between Koenji and Asagaya in Tokyo) a total of
ten times between August 2007 and February 2013. Participating directors
made new films of up to ten minutes each, which we screened for one another
in person (and mostly didn’t upload on YouTube, which became popular in the
same period).
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