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The Tokyo International Film Festival will review its 39th edition once it wraps and reassess where it stands on the international circuit before its 40th anniversary next year, festival director Hisamatsu Takeo says.
“I believe the direction we establish through that process will also help define TIFF’s course for the next decade, leading up to its 50th edition,” Hisamatsu tells Variety.
This year’s festival, he says, already reflects a direction the team has begun to set. The 39th edition has grown to 204 films, up from 184 last year.
“We are somehow in a competitive relationship with the Busan IFF, we’re close geographically and our dates are close too. I think the time has come to re-examine where TIFF should position itself, both within Asia and within the world,” Hisamatsu says.
The appeal of festivals such as Cannes and Venice is bound up with their host cities, he adds.
“Tokyo has a distinctive appeal of its own: it’s a vibrant, multifaceted city where tradition and modernity coexist, and mainstream culture intersects with subculture. These are qualities we should do more to showcase to the world,” he says.
The festival is organized by UniJapan, which also runs the TIFFCOM market and a set of international promotion and support programs. Hisamatsu, who is also UniJapan’s executive director, wants those three arms working more closely together and offering more to filmmakers and producers.
Festivals typically don’t own the rights to the films they show, so a title’s life after Tokyo rests largely with its rights holders and distributors. Even so, Hisamatsu wants UniJapan to do more to help Japanese films that screen and win prizes at the festival take their next step.
Two initiatives point in that direction. Nippon Cinema Now, the festival’s showcase for Japanese cinema, becomes a competitive section for the first time this year, with two new awards. And the new TIFF Work-in-Progress program, or TIFF-WIP, links Japanese films still in production with international festivals and industry figures, with the aim of raising their profile abroad and opening doors to overseas distribution.
A festival, Hisamatsu says, has to balance two jobs: bringing foreign films to local audiences and taking local films overseas. Right now, he argues, the case for pushing Japanese titles abroad is strong. Japan was Country of Honor at this year’s Cannes Film Market, and more than 30 Japanese films played at the Busan International Film Festival. New talent keeps arriving, he says, and the government is backing a policy of support for the content industry as a whole, not just film.
Even festivals billed as international, he says, are “deeply rooted in their respective countries and cultures – a purely global orientation would strip them of that character. That’s why I think the ‘glocal’ perspective will matter more and more.”
This year’s marquee slots tilt toward mainstream entertainment, a contrast with the arthouse programming Tokyo is better known for. Zeze Takahisa’s “Sukiyaki” opens the festival, Yamazaki Takashi’s “Godzilla Minus Zero” is the centerpiece and “Train to Busan” director Yeon Sang-ho’s “Colony” closes it.
“These films were selected on their individual merits from among the candidates we considered. It wasn’t a deliberate strategy to shift the festival’s identity in any particular direction,” Hisamatsu says.
