Marie Miyayama premieres "Der Rote Punkt (The Red Dot)" at Germany's Asia Film Fest

by Chris MaGee

Twitch's Todd Brown thankfully twigged me to the upcoming 5th Annual Asia Film Fest taking place in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg from October 30th until November 9th. Programmers have assembled a really impressive line-up including such notable Japanese films as Tetsuya Nakashima's "Paco and the Magical Picture Book", Yoshihiro Nishimura's "Tokyo Gore Police" and the director's cut of Ryuhei Kitamura's 2006 action film "LoveDeath". Check out the full line-up here.

One of the most interesting films in the line-up for me though is a Japanese-German co-production by a new director, Marie Miyayama. In 1998 Miyama, a graduate of the Film Studies and Creative Writing Departments at Waseda University, was working as a translator for a Japanese family traveling in Germany. The reason for their trip was to visit the exact spot where their parents had died in a car crash. The daughter had the precise location of the accident indicated with a red dot on a map. Years later Miyayama would turn her experiences with this family into a script titled "Der Rote Punkt (The Red Dot)" and the finished feature will be making its premiere at this year's Asia Film Fest.

In the film a Japanese college student named Aki Onodera (Yuki Inomata) travels to Germany and the site of the car accident that took her parents life 18 years before. While there she is befriended by a German family, the Webers, and is soon caught up in their lives, conflicts and secrets.

I searched around online for a good half hour trying to track down a trailer for this fascinating sounding film, but so far I've come up empty-handed. Never fear, I'll keep searching and when I track it down I'll be sure to post it here on the blog.