Zipangu Fest Reveals Full Programme: Re-Scored Silent Classics, Animation, Experimental And Brzilians in Japan
London - Thursday 23rd August 2012
Japanese film festival moves to Cinema Museum to celebrate Japan's legacy on celluloid.
Zipangu Fest is pleased to announce the full line up of its 2012 programme.
Following its move to a new venue, the Cinema Museum in London's Kennington district, the third Zipangu Fest celebrates Japan's rich cinematic heritage with retrospective screenings of some unseen gems alongside a host of newer titles, with a large proportion of the programme screened from film.
The Reel Zipangu section includes Kaizō Hayashi's critically-regarded 1986 homage to Japan's silent era, To Sleep So As To Dream, and a long overdue revival of Teinosuke Kinugasa's avant-garde masterpiece from 1928 and one of the first Japanese films ever screened in the West, Crossways. A samurai drama filmed in the style of German Expressionism, the film will be presented with an illustrated lecture by Festival Director Jasper Sharp before its screening with a specially-commissioned score by Minima, one of the leading bands accompanying silent film in Europe.
Spirit Made Flesh is an experimental programme that explores the very materiality of the medium and includes the work of three filmmakers, Momoko Seto, Shinkan Tamaki and the latest film from Takashi Makino, invited guest at Zipangu Fest 2011, where he presented the Enter the Cosmos programme. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion 'Is There Still a Need for Film in a Digitising World?'
Fukushima 8, a compilation of 8mm home movie treasures from the 1930s onwards filmed by the families of the disaster-struck region will be screened on the Opening Night, alongside Atsushi Wada's animation The Great Rabbit, recipient of the Silver Bear Award at Berlinale 2012. The centrepiece of this opening evening is the first ever screening in the West of the 1997 Japanese-DPKR co-production, Somi - The Taekwon-do Woman. Tickets are available in advance from Crowdfunder.
Animation will also be represented with the return of our popular Beyond Anime section. In Midori-ko, a university researcher protects a human/vegetable hybrid in a dystopic fantasy drawn completely by hand that took its director Keita Kurosaka ten years to complete, while the live-action doll drama Encounters similarly showcases the one-man bedroom auteur aesthetic. Its director, Takashi Iitsuka, will be present to introduce the film. Anime fans will also be riveted by Masanori Tominaga's enlightening and surprisingly moving documentary The Echo of Astro Boy's Footsteps about the mysterious double life of the pioneering animation sound designer Matsuo Ohno.
The Melting Pot Japan section features two works that look at Brazilian immigrant populations in Japan, Kimihiro Tsumura and Mayu Nakamura's documentary Lonely Swallows: Living as Children of Migrant Workers, and the Closing Film, Katsuya Tomita's vivacious portrait of small-town dreams and prejudices in provincial Kofu, Saudade. One of the most exciting figures in indie filmmaking in Japan, Tomita will be present at the festival as a guest with his scriptwriter Toranosuke Aizawa.
As with previous years, parts of the programme will be touring to selected venues across the UK, beginning with the King Kong vs Godzilla & Matango Triple Creature Double Feature, which will tour to the following venues between September and November: the Star & Shadow, Newcastle (20 & 23 September); the Watershed, Bristol (6 October); Derby QUAD Theatre (12 October), Glasgow Film Theatre (21 October), the National Media Museum, Bradford (26 October) and Leeds International Film Festival (3 November).
Festival Director and Chief Curator, Jasper Sharp, comments: “With digital projection set to become the norm for the global film industry, it seems fitting that the title of our Closing Film, Saudade, translates roughly to nostalgia, or longing. Like many of our films, it was made to be shown on 35mm, and as such, will find a perfect home at the Cinema Museum, a veritable shrine to this magical art-form, which coincidentally itself is also situated in an area with a sizeable South American population. I hope this year's programme, which was curated very much with this amazing venue in mind, will intrigue, move and inform people about the many forms of cinema in Japan, but above all, the key word is ‘fun’, and I look forward to sharing these images with audiences.'
The 3rd Zipangu Fest is set to take place at The Cinema Museum in Kennington, South London from September 14th to 16th 2012.
For more details, visit the official website at http://zipangufest.com.
Further information can be obtained by emailing [email protected], or by subscribing to our press list at http://zipangufest.com/press/2012. To attend our press screening, please complete a short form at http://zipangufest.wufoo.com/forms/zipangu-fest-2012-press-screening-registration to register your interest.
