I should start this dispatch with a confession of my bias: Tokyo is one of my favourite cities in the world. I first visited on a solo trip in 2019, and have spent every year since saving to go back. I actually was there for four days in April of this year with my sister on holiday, but when the Tokyo International Film Festival invited Little White Lies to visit for their 37th edition in November, no 14-hour plane journey was going to stand in my way. A dazzling metropolis that seems to dwarf London in scale, ambition, technology, and hospitality, Tokyo is a dream location for a film festival, particularly considering the impact of Japanese cinema on the global film stage.
Yet the Tokyo International Film Festival might not be an event that audiences outside of the city’s engaged movie-loving community are familiar with. Founded in 1985, it’s certainly welcomed some high-profile guests to the capital, including Gregory Peck, Norman Jewison, Tommy Lee Jones and Wim Wenders who all served as previous jury presidents. This year Tony Leung presided over the competition deliberations, while legends including Johnnie To and Kiyoshi Kurasawa dropped in for masterclasses, as the festival held its second edition post-Covid. Based in a handful of cinemas located in the city’s upmarket Ginza district, it’s a notably convenient city festival – the venues are all within a 10-minute walk of each other – and its late scheduling in the global release calendar means the programming team benefit from being able to screen some festival favourites from around the world.
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This year, big-ticket galas included Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain and Mati Diop’s Dahomey, with the world première of Shiraishi Kazuya’s samurai epic 11 Rebels opening the festival. For the sake of finding a way to condense my festival into four days, I opted to concentrate on the Japanese films across the programme, which were mostly found within the ‘Nippon Cinema Now’ and ‘Asian Futures’ strands, with the exception of Teki Cometh, Yoshida Daihachi’s eerie black-and-white drama which played in competition (and swept the board).
Teki Cometh was by far my favourite film I saw at the festival – adapted from Tsutsui Yasutaka’s novel of the same name, it’s a haunting character study centred on 77-year-old retiree Gisuke Watanabe, who spends his days cooking, cleaning and writing, content by the relative solitude and occasional social commitments he has with friends and ex-pupils. What starts as a seemingly warm portrait of old age quickly becomes something stranger and more interesting as Gisuke is warned by mysterious emails of an approaching enemy. It’s no surprise that the festival jury were so taken with the film, but it’s particularly pleasing to see a Japanese feature win the Tokyo Grand Prix, which hasn’t happened since 2005.
The other Japanese films in the main competition were Ohku Akiko’s She Taught Me Serendipity, which proved to be a sweet romantic drama about classmates who fall in love only to experience the inevitable hardships that come with romance, and Katayama Shinzo’s surreal erotic drama Lust in the Rain, about a love triangle in 1940s Japan. But there was plenty more Japanese talent across the festival’s offerings, notably in Adachi Mojiri’s The Harbour Lights, about a third-generation Korean immigrant struggling with her sense of place and identity in Kobe, and in Morii Yusuke’s Route29, about an isolated cleaner who ends up on a disastrous road trip with the 12-year-old girl she’s supposed to be retrieving. Across the festival Japanese cinema had a strong presence, though not in the names that many non-Japanese audiences would recognise. It was a rare treat to be able to watch so many films which are sadly unlikely to be shown outside their native country – and highlights the possibilities around the world for greater co-programming, whereby festivals and distributors could partner up to help films reach wider audiences and thereby bring filmmakers to entirely new audiences.
After all, this is the purpose of film festivals in my eyes – although the likes of Cannes, Venice and Toronto are world-famous and provide launch platforms for many filmmakers, they are still largely inaccessible and regional in their programming. There is an entire global network of smaller festivals around the world that speak directly to film lovers outside that limited bubble, and now more than ever, it feels like fostering international exchange and collaboration is the key to not only festival success but building a better international film community. Being welcomed so enthusiastically in Tokyo proves that language is little barrier to this. United by a love of cinema (and thanks to the efforts of the incredibly talented subtitlers and translators who make TIFF possible for those who don’t speak Japanese) it was an honour to meet the festival team themselves and some of the many guests from across Japan and Asia who had travelled to the city for the festival.
Outside of the cinema screens, it goes without saying that Tokyo is a film lover’s paradise. Beyond the famous Ghibli Museum (which I couldn’t get a ticket for) there is no shortage of ways for travellers to entertain themselves, from a walking tour of Shibuya’s Tokyo Toilets (as seen in Perfect Days) to a trip to Vintage Jinbocho, a shop packed floor-to-ceiling with Japanese posters, pamphlets and other cinema paraphernalia (I snagged a large original Mulholland Drive poster for £50).
If you are planning on making a trip to Tokyo, it can be easy to opt for April’s cherry blossom season, given the pleasant weather and stunning sights of pink blooms caught in the wind. But the autumnal skies of late October – when TIFF takes place – is an equally alluring option, especially when you consider the wealth of sento (public baths more akin to UK spas) in the city. The fact that you could time your trip to fit in some of the Tokyo International Film Festival should be a big plus; this relatively young festival with big ambitions and a keen, welcoming team of staff (plus English subtitles for most screenings!) seems set to grow in the future.
