Line-up details on the 31st Annual Pia Film Festival are announced

by Chris MaGee

The folks at the Pia Film Festival have been a huge help to both Jasper Sharp and I and I as we've been pulling together the line-up for the inaugural Shinsedai Cinema Festival here in Toronto, so it was with a great deal of excitement that I saw Jason Gray's post about the first details of the line-up for the 31st Annual Pia Film Festival taking place at the National Film Center in Kyôbashi, Tokyo from July 17th to July 31st.

Major highlights? The premiere of hyper-prolific 26-year-old filmmaker Yuya Ishii's 5th feature film in four years titled "Kawa no Soko kara Konnichiwa". Ishii of course got his career kick started when his debut film "Bare-assed Japan" picked up the top prize at the 2007 Pia Film Festival. Besides Ishii's latest Pia will feature Sasaki Sô's "Puritan", and a three film retrospective of the works of Nagisa Oshima ("A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs", "Death By Hanging", and "In the Realm of the Senses") with introductory talks given by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Koji Wakamatsu.

You can check out more (in Japanese) about this year's Pia Film Festival by heading to its official website here.