Akira Ogata's "The Milkwoman" heads up FREE Japan Foundation film screenings in December

by Chris MaGee

Once a year the Japan Foundation digs into their vault of film prints and tours a handful through cities worldwide who are lucky enough to have a JF office. Toronto is one of those cities, so this December we will get a chance to see the kind of Japanese films that so many people don't even know exist. Amongst the sea of Kurosawa classics, Miike flash, and "Machine Girl" gore the Japan Foundation Toronto will be presenting a quartet of films at The Bloor Cinema, and what's best they will be presented FREE!

Between Wednesday, December 9th and Sunday December 13th Torontonians can see Kiyoshi Sasabe's "The Stars Converge", a cross cultural love story between a Japanese woman and a Korean man during the 1970s, Japanese New Wave pioneer Yoshishige Yoshida's 2002 film "Women in the Mirror" about a woman in search of her daughter which stars Yoshida's wife Mariko Okada, Kichitaro Negishi's "Dog in a Sidecar", about a woman's reminisences of the most important summer of her life, and... and this I'm very excited about... Akira Ogata's masterful tale of middle-aged love "The Milkwoman" (above). I am a HUGE fan of "The Milkwoman" (you only need to read my review of it here to see that that's true), so I encourage all of you out there who love international film and who might be a little light in the wallet due to Xmas shopping, the terrible economy, living pay cheque to pay cheque, or a combination of all of the above, to get out to The Bloor in December to catch not only "The Milkwoman" but any and all of these FREE screenings hosted by the Japan Foundation.

Click here to see the full schedule and get additional details on these once a year, can't miss screenings.