Japan Cuts 2017, NY’s annual festival celebrating the best of new Japanese cinema, is back with its 11th edition scheduled from July 13 to 23. This year’s roster includes 28 feature and 6 short films, ranging across epic blockbusters, indies, documentaries, animations and restored classics. In-person access to filmmakers and stars, Q&A sessions and parties are some extra treats on offer.
Yusuke Iseya in Mumon © 2017 Mumon Film Partners
The festival opens on Thursday, July 13th, with Yoshihiro Nakamura’s Mumon: Land of the Stealth, a playful take on the period drama genre, full of fantastical ninja moves and its own sense of eccentricity. Nakamura will be available for post-screening Q&A and Opening Night Party at Japan Society’s historic theater.
After a series of International, North America, Us, East Coast and NY Premieres, the festival will close with Sunao Katabuchi’s enchanting In This Corner of the World, a poignant coming-of-age story set during WWII.
Yusuke Iseya in Mumon © 2017 Mumon Film Partners
The festival opens on Thursday, July 13th, with Yoshihiro Nakamura’s Mumon: Land of the Stealth, a playful take on the period drama genre, full of fantastical ninja moves and its own sense of eccentricity. Nakamura will be available for post-screening Q&A and Opening Night Party at Japan Society’s historic theater.
After a series of International, North America, Us, East Coast and NY Premieres, the festival will close with Sunao Katabuchi’s enchanting In This Corner of the World, a poignant coming-of-age story set during WWII.
- 6/24/2017
- by Arnav Sinha
- AsianMoviePulse
‘The Land of Hope’ is a simple and honest movie about fear, hope and freedom when the unexpected and unavoidable comes our way. In this case, a nuclear meltdown, no less. It’s not a singular tale, in that it’s not a survival-against-the-odds story, nor an especially ‘heroic’ one, but it is the kind of experience that any family could have had in a Fukushima-like aftermath.
The devastated Nagashima in ‘The Land of Hope’.
Sion doesn’t overreach for the unique, but rather keeps the focus on realism, indulging in magic lyrical moments only on a couple of occasions. The result is a fairly empathetic experience, even when the story wanders, visiting sub-themes such as peer-pressure or mistrust of the government.
Samuel Goldwyn said that a movie ‘should start with an earthquake and build to a climax’. Sion Sono, the director of ‘The Land of Hope’, obviously took notice,...
The devastated Nagashima in ‘The Land of Hope’.
Sion doesn’t overreach for the unique, but rather keeps the focus on realism, indulging in magic lyrical moments only on a couple of occasions. The result is a fairly empathetic experience, even when the story wanders, visiting sub-themes such as peer-pressure or mistrust of the government.
Samuel Goldwyn said that a movie ‘should start with an earthquake and build to a climax’. Sion Sono, the director of ‘The Land of Hope’, obviously took notice,...
- 9/18/2016
- by Miguel Angel Aijon
- AsianMoviePulse
★★★☆☆ The Land of Hope (2012) is a delicately-paced drama, centring on the lives of a rural farming family who are affected by a nearby environmental catastrophe, set a few years after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. Sion Sono intended to create a film that captured how a tragedy like this affects the everyday lives of people, and he does this with an air of haunting beauty. Sono tells the story of a family divided by the disaster, torn two ways in an attempt to save themselves. Yoichi (Jun Murakami) and his wife Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka) face each and every day with the fear of radiation affecting their unborn child.
Kagurazaka is particularly adept at portraying the desperate lengths Izumi will go to in order to protect her child, illustrating her radiophobia with a sensitivity that could have easily been overdone, whilst Murakumi displays a desperate husband trying to do his best with earnest.
Kagurazaka is particularly adept at portraying the desperate lengths Izumi will go to in order to protect her child, illustrating her radiophobia with a sensitivity that could have easily been overdone, whilst Murakumi displays a desperate husband trying to do his best with earnest.
- 8/27/2013
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
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