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The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2016

IKIRU: The Highs and Lows of Life in Japanese Cinema Experience Japan through Cinema 5 February – 11 February 2016 at ICA, London 5 February – 26 March 2016, nationwide

The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme, the largest programme focusing on Japanese cinema in the UK, returns in 2016 offering an enlightening and expansive introduction to Japanese cinema, exploring issues surrounding the ways people live, and the views towards life and death in Japan. Touring to 13 cities nationwide, the programme features films from a broad range of genres, including classics by Japanese legendary filmmakers, documentary, contemporary films and the latest anime blockbusters.

Kurosawa made his name as a director of samurai epics and period dramas such as Seven Samurai and Rashomon, but his 1952 film Ikiru, a humanistic portrayal of a salaryman facing a terminal illness represented a different side of his oeuvre. The depiction of the lives of everyday individuals may betray the expectation of western viewers’ who already set a specific image towards Kurosawa but he, as a filmmaker never departed from his pursuit of fundamental question through his film; the question of what we are.

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Inspired by Kurosawa’s Ikiru as a starting point, this programme, though seeming broad, challenges the question of human existence by looking at the way in which Japanese filmmakers have been observing and capturing people’s lives, and how people across the ages persevere, negotiate and reconcile with the environment and situation they live in. Additionally, 2016 marks the fifth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, a disaster through which many lost their lives, but also many showed the strength and might to live on. Even if the programme includes films not directly related to the disaster, it is nevertheless timely to pause and reflect on the human life and its depiction in Japanese cinema.

From the newly released work, A Farewell to Jinu (2015) by Suzuki Matsuo to the classic A Japanese Tragedy (1953) by old master Keisuke Kinoshita, and from anime feature films to, for the very first time, documentary, this programme showcases a variety of real lives of Japanese people in a manner that is as entertaining as it is informative. It will feature female director Yuki Tanada’s cosplay-infused infidelity drama The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky (2012) and Noriben – The Recipe for Fortune (2009), a tale of a single mother and her quest to be independent by opening a lunch box shop. The programme also explores the issue of Japan’s aging society by screening Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days (2013), a heart-warming tale of a mother suffering from dementia and her son.

Japanese cinema may not be unique in its focus on lives of the individual, but it is in intimate representations of its people such as these that the country’s filmmakers really excel, suggesting a commonality in the human existence that is profound and universal.

Details and venues can be found here:

Website: www.jpf.org.uk

Japan Foundation Facebook: www.facebook.com/JapanFoundationLondon Japan Foundation

Twitter:

@jpflondon

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