Japan in Germany 5: Japan Week 2011 in Frankfurt am Main

For the past 35 years, the Japanese have been promoting their culture and business interests abroad by hosting a Japan Week in major cities around the world. As this year marks the 150th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Germany (or Prussia as it then was) and Japan.  This year’s Japan Week will take place in Frankfurt am Main between the 5th and 12th of November. Events will include theatre, dance, an art and handicrafts market and exhibition, a food pavilion, an ikebana workshop, cooking classes, a football (soccer) tournament and much, much more. See the official website for details (DE/EN/JP)

The highlight for me will, of course, be the film programme organized by Nippon Connection at the newly renovated Film Museum. Many filmmakers will be on hand to participate in lively discussions after the screenings. In order to highlight the theme of German-Japanese relations, the programme includes Japan-themed documentaries by  German directors and a Japanese director who works in Germany.  There are also  two films made by graduates of the Tokyo University of the Arts in Yokohama – which is the future sister city of Frankfurt.

The most anticipated event is the world premiere of the crowdfunded documentary RADIOACTIVISTS which looks closely at Japan after the disaster in Fukushima with a focus of the efforts of the anti-nuclear movement.

Saturday, November 5th, 16:00

Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia Special

http://www.shortshorts.org/

The Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia is the biggest short film fest in Asia. It is held each summer in Tokyo and Yokohama and features short films from around the world. For Japan Week, Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia has put together a special programme of recent Japanese shorts with English subtitles.

Romance (Toshiro SONODA, Japan 2010, 3 Min., OmeU)

Ken and Kazu (Hiroshi SHOJI, Japan 2011, 23 Min., OmeU)

Tourism Hokkaido "City" (Yosuke YAMAGUCHI, Japan 2010, 18 Min., OmeU)

Meat (Takahiro KIMURA, Japan 2009, 17 Min., OmeU)

bonz (Shohei TADA, Japan 2010, 5 Min., OmeU)

Mister Rococo (Naoto HIDAKA, Japan 2010, 13 Min., OmeU)

Heaven's Island (Naoko SHIMADA, Japan 2010, 14 Min., OmeU)

Saturday, November 5th, 20:30

Yellow Kid 

(Tetsuya MARIKO, Japan, 2009, 107 Min., OmeU)

German Premiere, www.yellow-kid.jp

Debut feature film from Tetsuya MARIKO, an up-and-coming director and winner for two consecutive years of the Off-Theater Competition Grand Prix of the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival with THE FAR EAST APARTMENT (Kyokuto no Manshon) in 2003 and MARIKO’S 30 PIRATES (Mariko Sanjukki) in 2004. This quick-paced film with exhaustive camera work depicts the interaction of two youths living in two completely different worlds - boxing and manga. Boxing is what maintains the spirits of Tamura (Endo Kaname) who is leading a financially constrained life while taking care of his grandmother with dementia. One day, Hattori (Iwase Ryo), a manga-ka, visits the boxing gym where Tamura practices to gather material. Mariko’s latest film NINIFUNI showed at this year’s film festival in Locarno.

Sunday, September 6th, 20:00

Panorama 

(Ryo YOSHIKAWA, Japan, 2011, 89 Min., OmeU)

International Premiere

Special Guest: Ryo YOSHIKAWA

Made possible by the support of the The City of Yokohama - Frankfurt Representative Office

Haruka’s partner has walked out on her. She drops her son off with his grandmother and tries her luck out working at a hostess club. Kana pretends that all is well with her marriage, even though she knows her husband is involved with other women. Things don’t turn out the way both women had hoped.

PANORAMA is Ryo YOSHIKAWA’s graduate film for the Tokyo University of the Arts in Yokohama.

Wednesday, November 9th, 20:30

They Call Us Aliens

(Veit HELMER, Germany/Japan, 2008, 78 Min, EN/JP/PO/RU, OmeU)

Three Ukrainian girls break into the modelling business, a South African bachelor prepares for his Shinto wedding and a priest from Finland runs for election... Just a few protagonists of this documentary film by German director Veit Helmer (TUVALU, ABSURDISTAN). Japan was closed for foreigners until 1853. Now people from all over the world move to Tokyo to explore Japanese culture. Japanese meet foreigners with curiosity and anxiety. The film observes how foreigners struggle to make a living in a totally different culture.

Supporting film:

OSHIMA

(Lars Henning, Germany, 2011, 34 Min.)

Special Guest: actor Yuki IWAMOTO

An urban fairy tale about a sad and overtired Japanese salaryman on a business trip.  In the course of one night in a strange German city  he begins to lose more and more of himself.  Yuki Iwamoto, whose face is well known to fans of Nippon Connection, stars in the lead role of Oshima.

Friday, November 11th, 18:00

The Red Spot 

(Der Rote Punkt, Marie MIYAYAMA, Germany, 2008, 82 Min., DE/JP, OmU)

Special Guest: Marie MIYAYAMA

www.derrotepunkt-derfilm.de

A Japanese student named Aki Onodera travels to Germany to retrace the steps of her lost family.  She is armed with a map marked with a red spot - the location of the tragic accident that took her family from her.  In idyllic eastern Allgäu, she is taken in by the Weber family as their guest.  Her arrival causes great disruption in the Weber family as Aki's presence awakens a terrible secret held by one of the family members.  

Read my review of this film.

Saturday, November 12th, 20:00

Radioactivists 

(Julia LESER and Clarissa SEIDEL, Germany/Japan 2011, 72 Min., JP, OmeU)

World Premiere, Special Guests: Julia LESER and Clarissa SEIDEL

www.radioactivists.org

Followed by a discussion with Prof. Steffi Richter of Leipzig University

When Japan’s triple catastrophe took place on the 11th of March 2011, two German filmmakers Julia Leser and Clarissa Seidel were already on location in the country. They immediately decided to follow the re-birth of the anti-nuclear protest movement and to document their demonstrations in order to counterbalance the one-sided media coverage of the nuclear crisis. Japanese intellectuals, sociologists, scientists and anti-nucler activists critical of the sequence of events surrounding the ill-fated Tepco (Tokyo electric Power Company) are all given a chance to speak their piece. RADIOACTIVISTS is a unique historical documentation of one of Japan’s greatest human tragedies.

Venue:

Kino im Deutschen Filmmuseum

Schaumainkai 41, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

Entry fees: 7 euro / 5 euro

To reserve tickets call:

069 961 220 220

OmU = original version with German subtitles

OmeU = original version with English subtitles

This event is supported by:

Referat für Internationale Angelegenheiten der Stadt Frankfurt am Main

The City of Yokohama - Frankfurt Representative Office

Organized by:

Nippon Connection e.V., c/o AStA, Mertonstr. 26-28, 60325 Frankfurt am Main

info@nipponconnection.com, www.nipponconnection.com


This blog post is part the Japan in Germany series.

Japan Media Arts Festival Short Film Special

The Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund 2011 put together a selection of award-winning and jury recommended animated shorts, music videos and commercials (CM) from the past decade. The thirteen works will be screening in the main cinema on September 24th at 19:00 and on October 2nd at 18:00. They also screen on a continuous loop on one of three TV screens in the exhibition itself where up to two people can watch at one time.

The animated shorts include two videos which have had much success online: Hiroyasu Ishida’s humorous Fumiko's Confession (2010), which is a great showcase of the young animator’s talent, and Riichiro Mashiro’s hilarious Ski Jumping Pairs (2003). Koji Yamamura’s A Child’s Metaphysics (2007) is a brilliant lesser known film by the master and Ryo Okawara’s Animal Dance, which made my list of Best Japanese Animated Shorts 2010 is also on the program. A low res version of Nobuo Takahashi’s Musashino Plateau has been online for some time, but it was much more impressive in high res at the festival.

Other animated shorts included Noriaki Okamoto’s unusual textured piece Algol (2008) about a world in which only machines and the scientist who created them exist. Yusuke Sakamoto, whose stop motion film Dandelion’s Sister (2007) totally blew me away at Nippon Connection 2008, was back with another atmospheric work, this time done in paint, about the end of a relationship.  Takeuchi Taijin is another great young animator, whose film A Wolf Loves Pork (2008) made my list of Top Animated Shorts of the Decade,  won recognition from the JMAF Jury in 2010 for his film a song like a fish, which I would describe as Tomoyasu Murata’s stop motion animation meets Takashi Ishida’s stop motion painting of interior spaces.

If I had been the programmer, I would have rounded the animated shorts out with Atsushi Wada’s In a Pig’s Eye (2010), Kunio Kato’s La maison en petits cubes (2008), Tochka’s PiKA PiKA (2006), Amica Kubo/Seita Inoue’s Bloomed Words (2006), Akino Kondoh’s The Evening Traveling (2002), Tomoyasu Murata’s Nostalgia (2001), or other worthy winners of the JMAF Animation Excellence Prize.

Although the music videos and the Nike commercial are all entertaining and very creative, it was odd having them mixed with the less commercial fare. I would have put them into a separate programme of their own.  There have certainly been enough creative music videos and CM winning awards at JMAF in the past decade and a half that it has been running to do so.  My hands down favourite of these is the music video Hibi no Neiro (Tone of the Everyday) which has used webcam technology in a most original way. The videos embedded below are all belonging to commercial works or those shared online by the artists themselves. Where possible, I encourage supporting independent artists with your wallet – which you can do by purchasing Koji Yamamura’s work – see my review of A Child's Metaphysics for purchasing options.

Fumiko's Confession 

(フミコの告白, Hiroyasu Ishida, 2010)

natsu wo matteimashita

music video for amazarashi (夏を待っていました, YKBX, 2010)

Animal Dance 

(アニマルダンス, Ryo Ōkawara, 2009)

read my review

A Child's Metaphysics 

(こどもの形而上学, Kōji Yamamura, 2007)

read my review

the river 

(川旅行, Yusuke Sakamoto, 2009)

Algol 

(Noriaki Okamoto, 2008)

Musashino Plateau

(ムサシノ プラトー, Nobuo Takahashi, 2006)

a song like a fish 

(魚に似た唄, Taijin Takeuchi, 2010)

make.believe / Genki Rockets 

(Tetsuya Mizuguchi/Kenji Tamai, 2010)

arukuaround / sakanaction 

watch video at JMAF website
(Kazuaki Seki, 2010)

Hibi No Neiro (日々の音色/Tone of everyday)

(Magico Nakamura/Masayoshi Nakamura/Masashi Kawamura/Hal Kirkland, 2009)

Nike Music Shoe 

See how they made the commercial here.
(Naoki Ito/Frank Hahn, 2010)

Ski Jumping Pairs

(スキージャンプ・ペア, Riichiro Mashima, 2003)

Koji Yamamura interviewed on Dommune

Earlier today (around midday Central European Summer Time), Dommune did a live broadcast event with Koji Yamamura on USTREAM Live. He was interviewed by Shuzo Shiota, the president and CEO of Polygon Pictures – and one of the co-producers for Muybridge’s Strings. Also participating in the talk was animation expert Yukio Hiruma. In addition to co-producing some of Yamamura’s early work (Kid’s Castle and Kipling, Jr.), Hiruma also recently acted as a digital effects supervisor on Keita Kurosaka’s masterpiece Midori-ko (2010)

The middle of the day was a bit awkward for me because my live-in translator (ie. my husband) was not around to help me out with the nuances of the Japanese language and I had to pick up my kids from school. Some of the highlights that I did catch included:

Original drawings from the production of Muybridge’s Strings:

Behind the scenes photographs from the soundtrack recording and mixing sessions in the NFB studios in Montréal – Yamamura talked reverentially about the whole experience of working at the NFB studios. . . and with shock about how cold it gets in Montréal in the winter.

Normand Roget at work

The original music and sound design are by Normand Roger, Pierre Yves Drapeau, Denis Chartrand. Yamamura talked a bit about the impressive career of Norman Roger - who has done the soundtracks to more than a hundred films by top animators from around the world. Yamamura mentioned in particular Roger’s collaborations with Frédéric Back such as Crac! (1981) and The Man Who Planted Trees (1988). Yamamura was careful to point out that although the two men have collaborated together that Back was not an NFB employee. Learn more about this collaboration at filmjourney and Back's official website.

Yamamura getting the NFB studio experience

I tried to get a couple of screencaps of a wonderful illustration of how a sequence of music borrowed from Bach should go together with the animation. The image was too shaky to get a good shot of it, so I do hope that it appears in the Making Of footage / DVD extras when the time comes – it was a piece of art in itself.

Shiota, Yamamura, and Hiruma then moved into a discussion about the Muybridge’s Strings Road Show, which opens on September 17th and runs until October 7th at the at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu. They went through Program B discussing the films by Norman McLaren, Jacques Drouin, Ishu Patel, Georges Schwitzgebel, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby that will be running alongside Yamamura’s work.

Admiring Norman McLaren's handiwork

Before I had to race out the door to pick up my kids, I managed to catch a some the clips of McLaren’s Canon (1964), Drouin’s Mindscape and Patel’s Afterlife (1978) - not a part of the program but they indulged in a clip anyways - and The Bead Game (1977). Yamamura had brought along some wonderful items from his personal collection including a present of 5 pins from Drouin who is famed for his use of the pinscreen technique.

5 Pins for Koji from Jacques Drouin

He also told an anecdote about meeting Ishu Patel for the first time when he was a very young man. I thought I heard him say that it was at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival, and when I looked it up I found that Patel had indeed been on the International Jury of the first ever animation festival in Hiroshima in 1985 when Yamamura would have been a university student.

First meeting with Patel - look how young Yamamura is!!

Can’t wait for Muybridge’s Strings to make it to Europe!

To see all the screencaps I took, see my Google Plus Photos

Support Koji Yamamura buy ordering his work on DVD:

Order from Japan via cdjapan:

The Old Crocodile and Selected Works (JP/EN/FR)

Mt. Head and Selected Works  (JP with English subs)

Kafka Inaka Isha (JP only)

From the US: