Japanese Film Festival Opens In Sydney

Just A Quick Note

The Japanese Film Festival kicked off last night, with the usual speeches at the Reception and a pretty cool film called 'After School'. It's one of those films where the narrative is broken up and tells you one story, only to reveal it is entirely another case. The first half leads you to believe it's a story about a guy who runs out on his pregnant wife, leaving his best friend from his high school days to look after his wife. By the end of the film, you have a totally different take on the people.

It's a straight forward style of directing without any tricky camera moves, very tastefully done. There are another 16 films assembled for the festival so I'll be in there to see as many as I can.

The Festival Director Mr. Konomi is a very astute curator with an exceedingly good eye for cinema. He used to be an editor for a Manga publisher, so it shows. One imagines that culling 17 films out of 300 releases must be very difficult, but every year the Festival surprises with its content. Each year, the films collectively paint a very sophisticated picture of Japan and Japanese cinema.

This is another reason I keep saying we simply have to make more to understand who we are and what our cinema is about. If you tried to run the equivalent festival in Tokyo of Australian cinema, we'd be stuck at 15, because that is all we make. It wouldn't be a selection at all, it would be a total showcase of everything we make each year, the good, the bad and ugly.