Thursday, October 15, 2009

Kore-eda, Kitano and Kurosawa together at Tokyo Filmex

by Chris MaGee

Who's kicking himself for not getting himself in gear to go to Tokyo Filmex this year? That would be me. It wasn't enough that the nine day fest will be premiering Toshiaki Toyoda's "Blood of Rebirth" and that they've programmed a retrospective of Shochiku films from the 1930's, but now Jason Gray is reporting that three of the biggest directors in contemporary Japanese film will be on hand to take part in a very special symposium.

Titled "For the Bright Future of Cinema", and taking place at Meiji University's Surugadai campus on November 21st at 1:00 PM, the 5-hour symposium will feature... and just check out this list of names... Takeshi Kitano (center), Hirokazu Kore-eda (left), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (right), Susumu Terajima and Hidetoshi Nishijima. What a panel!

Kitasno will apparently be kicking things off first, which makes sense really seeing that Tokyo Filmex was started up exactly a decade ago in collaboration with his production company, Office Kitano, and then Kore-eda and Kurosawa will go head to head followed by Terajima and Nishijima. What's best is that soon the Tokyo Filmex website will soon have a page where people can submit questions electronically for Kitano's portion of the symposium. I guess that should be some kind of small solace for us suckers who aren't going to be there in person, but when you're missing out on being in the same room with these three men it really isn't. Darn!

The 10th Annual Tokyo Filmex Festival takes place from November 21st to November 29th.

2 comments:

Marc said...

Unfortunately for foreigners, this will almost certainly be entirely in Japanese with no translation. Most of the Filmex symposia always are.

keeperdesign said...

I really hope Kitano's next film is a step up from the last few. It's been 12 years since "Hana-Bi" and while I found his "Zatoichi" to be slick and fun, it does seem like he's slipping quite a bit. He's due for a Scorsese-like rebound.