#Japan #Film Festival Online 2024 will be Weds 5th-19th June (starts & ends noon JST so effectively the 18th for UK).
It's a great opportunity to see Japanese films which can be hard to find.
I'm going to watch as many as I can and post brief thoughts under #JFF2024 with the aim of helping those with busy lives choose one or two. Happy to have conversations as well.
Please follow the hashtag if you're interested.
Available here:
https://watch.jff.jpf.go.jp/page/jffonline2024/
#JDrama #JFilm
The Lines That Define Me -
an often gorgeous film about finding your own lines in art, the ones that express your own emotions and the life in them
The lines of this film shift from delicate to joyful to bold to struggle to fulfilling. It embodies the ethos it shows through its story.
https://mydramalist.com/724317-sen-wa-boku-o-kaku
#JFF2024 (films available online until 18th-19th June (depending on time zone)
We Made a Beautiful Bouquet
quietly exquisite
Single8
Another youth film focused on creativity, a visual art and finding your own voice. High school students work together, with the help of a uni film student and a history teacher, pushing themselves, their skills and ingenuity to make a short science fiction film with meaning.
It's left me with a big smile 💖
The Lone Ume Tree
About acceptance of difference and problems caused by those quick to judge. Cho-san has both learning disabilities and autism, needs his routines and works in a supported facility. He also has a great mum and difficult neighbours.
Father of the Milky Way Railroad
Beautiful, poetic melodrama depicting a romanticised and idealised life of an idealistic young man who, after his death, became one of Japan's most loved poets and writers.
Now to read some of his writings while this is still fresh in my mind.
The Invitation
One of the four prize-winning short horror films in #JFF2024
Glad I watched it during the afternoon :) Got a jump scare from the sound, I was using headphones and it was Right There 😂
The ending brought it together and made it extra creepy.
We're Broke, My Lord!
Fast-paced, silly with a good heart and only a bit of the laughing-at not -with side of Japanese comedy I don't get on with.
There are far better films in #JFF2024 but this was alright for a change of pace.
Anime Supremacy
I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I feel like there must be a lot I didn't understand. But then I'm not sure it was really in there.
Didn't get on with the first hour at all. Business pressure + ratings competition = could not care less. The whys which eventually emerged from the FL were poignant, but scant and cliched. Endings of the anime were moving.
Acting was excellent.
Interested in others' thoughts.
There were a lot of little injokes in this, and due to the format didn't have a lot of breathing room for actual explanations of anime production.
The acting was definitely the highlight, the rest was pretty good but I honestly didn't think much of either of the fictional anime series. (The end sting was what I was waiting for, though, and that made me grin.)
It looks like I can borrow the novel this was based on from the library system, so I may do that.
@kalloway Unexplained in-jokes makes sense. I'm used to figuring out where cultural jokes I don't understand are but this one did move at a clip.
The film (acting and music) did a lot of the work in making the endings of the animes moving. Took me until today to figure out how to word that in a 500 char friendly way :)
The line after the suckerpunch ('Not even my father hit me!') is from First Gundam, there was something from Evangelion later on... The actual fictional series - a magical girl series (mildly deconstructed) and a ambiguous mecha series are pretty common tropes. Good fare for their apparent time slots, though.
(The novel makes it sound like it shares the lead role more between the three women and I would have liked more with the animator, so going to put it on the list for the future.)
@kalloway I recognised Evangelion but it's been over 20 years