Japanese cinema is much more than animation. This is what Japan Foundation wants to show us. The New Delhi-based organisation is bringing the Japanese Film Festival for the first time to Chennai. The 10-day festival, in partnership with PVR Cinemas, will showcase 25 Japanese movies with English subtitles, for free, at VR Chennai.
The movies curated are recent; most of them have been released this year, and offer a sense of contemporary Japanese film culture. You can look forward to watching mega hits such as Kingdom , an action adventure film directed by Shinsuke Sato, which tells the story of how a young boy rose to the ranks of a general in ancient China. In a lighter vein is Bento Harassment , directed by Renpei Tsukamoto. The family comedy pokes fun at intergenerational strife, all centred around the Japanese trope of mothers making bento lunchboxes for their children.
“We started the Film Festival three years ago. For the first two years, we held it only in Delhi and Mumbai,” says Kaoru Miyamoto, Director-General of The Japan Foundation. This time, the JFF is heading to six cities, until February. “We used to hold film screenings before too, but it was only after our partnership with PVR that we were able to take this on a larger scale, and bring new movies to big screens here.”
The JFF also brought director Makoto Shinkai to the recently-concluded Delhi edition. The animator is behind popular fantasy movies such as Your Name (2016), an original take on the soul-swapping-bodies theme, and more recently, Weathering With You , the story of a boy who runs to Tokyo to befriend a girl who can control the weather.
Being part of the team that helped curate the movies, Miyamoto says, “We noticed that there was a lot of enthusiasm in India for Japanese animation movies. We want that to be the entry point to show other aspects of Japanese film culture.”
Japanese Film Festival starts today, and is on till November 17, at PVR Icon, VR Chennai, Anna Nagar. For the complete show schedule, visit www.jfindia.org.in
