From Friday 21 September until Sunday 23 September, JAEFF will be screening 5 classic feature-length films paired with 4 outstanding contemporary shorts rarely screened in the UK. Join us for a weekend of discovery, as we focus on themes of youth and protest in Japanese cinema from the new wave period of the 1960s and 70s to today.
Friday and Saturday screenings will be revealed shorty, but we're happy to announce that Sunday tickets are now on sale! We'll be at the Barbican Centre on 23 September. Do not miss the opportunity to attend our screenings as well as our free admission panel discussion with world renowned experts in Japanese cinema including film historians, academics, and curators!
Sunday 23 September 2018 – Barbican Cinema 3
Panel Discussion – The Tremors of the Japanese New Wave
A special discussion event in support of the Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival's programme of youth orientated films from the new wave period of the 1960s and 70s.
This free admission panel event will bring together world renowned experts in Japanese cinema including film historians, academics, and curators. Following the festival themes of youth and protest, they will address questions surrounding of the legacy of the cultural and social upheaval in Japan in the 1960s and the thematic and stylistic influences from the Japanese avant-garde.
Given the current cinematic climate, the question of gender representation in cinema is more prescient than ever. The panel will elucidate on the male dominated Japanese New Wave and discuss how filmmaking in Japan might, or might not, be diversifying. A factor that is reflected in this year's JAEFF line-up.
Sunday 23 September 2018 – Barbican Cinema 3
Susumu Hani blurs the line between fiction and documentary in his feature film debut. “Bad Boys” depicts the disaffected lives of “sun tribe” delinquents (similar to US “greasers”). Filmed in a dispassionate cinema-vérité style, “Bad Boys” chronicles the militaristic daily routines of reform school life with little sense of release or salvation (both for inmates and audience). Relief from the grind is found through occasional triumphs of collective action, which point to Hani's Marxist credentials, and in avant-garde musical pioneer Tōru Takemitsu's aching score.
“Bad Boys” is paired here with Kioto Aoki's “Studio Sunrise: a reflected self-portrait imitating movements of the sun”.
Sunday 23 September 2018 – Barbican Cinema 3
Closing Gala
Transgender actor Pîtâ gives an astonishing performance as Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet – where she's ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda for the attentions of club owner Gonda. One of Japan's leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto bends and distorts time, and freely mixes documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within-a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, his own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons. “Funeral Parade of Roses” is a celebration of youth and subcultures, a condemnation of intolerance, and a one-of-kind cinematic experience.
This key work of queer cinema screens in a new 4K digital restoration and is paired with “Looking for Jiro”, a performance video by artist Tina Takemoto inspired by the real-life case of a gay Japanese immigrant interned in the US during WWII.
