This year’s Japan Foundation (JPF) Touring Programme, which runs throughout February and March and is celebrating its 21st edition, is based around one of the great theme of cinema: memories. With screening venues spread widely over the UK, it covers the following thirty UK cities or counties (six more than last year, making it the largest number of JPF venues to date):
Aberystwyth Belfast Birmingham Bristol Cambridge Cardiff Chester Chichester Colchester Coventry Derby Dundee Edinburgh Exeter Inverness Kendal Lancaster Leicester Lewes Liverpool London Manchester Newcastle upon Tyne Norwich Nottingham Orkney Oxford Plymouth Sheffield and York.
(Click on any of the cities or counties above for more information.)
Under the moniker Unforgettable: Memories, Times and Reflections in Japanese Cinema, the programme gathers together films showing how Japanese filmmakers employ memories, from those using them as a focal point to those where they subliminally drive or affect characters’ behaviour.
Highlights include:
– the UK Premiere of Shadow of Fire, the latest work from festival favourite Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man),
– a new entry in the Roman Porno genre, Hand, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Nikkatsu’s controversial line of erotic cinema,
– visually stunning anime Lonely Castle in the Mirror,
– fascinating courtroom drama Winny about a computer programmer arrested for creating a P2P file-sharing platform,
– a retrospective classic from the Golden Age of Japanese cinema in Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Snow Flurry.
– plus a selection of new titles tackling contemporary Japanese social issues through such genres as drama, thrillers, sci-fi and comedy. Among the special guest directors attending the tour to introduce their films are director Tetsu Maeda with his topical care home mystery Do Unto Others and director Tetsuya Chihara whose Ice Cream Fever features generational women’s stories.