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The Nara International Film Festival (Niff) has selected six films from around the world to compete in its main competition this year. Organized by renowned Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase, the biennial festival will take place from September 20-23 in the historic city of Nara, Japan.

The competition lineup showcases emerging talents alongside established directors. It features films from the United Kingdom, China, Sweden, Azerbaijan, Spain, and France. These movies have screened at prestigious festivals worldwide and tackle diverse themes.

British director Joshua Trigg’s “Satu – Year of the Rabbit” makes its Asian premiere. The film debuted at the Raindance Film Festival. Chinese director Choy Ji’s directorial debut “Borrowed Time” first showed at last year’s Busan International Film Festival. Swedish director Ernst De Geer’s “The Hypnosis,” which won three awards at the 2023 Karlovy Vary Festival, also competes.

The other competition films are Malika Musaeva’s “The Cage Is...

Nara International Film Festival, the biennial event founded by acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase, has revealed the international competition line-up for its 2024 edition.

Titles include Satu - Year of the Rabbit by UK filmmaker Joshua Trigg, which premiered at Raindance in June; Chinese director Choy Ji’s feature debut Borrowed Time, first seen at last year’s Busan; and The Hypnosis by Sweden’s Ernst De Geer, which picked up three prizes at Karlovy Vary in 2023.

Further features are Malika Musaeva’s The Cage Is Looking For A Bird, Laura Ferres’ The Permanent Picture and Heartless by Nara Normande and Tiao,...

Marvel's "What If...?" animated series on Disney+ has allowed fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to see into parallel dimensions featuring alternate versions of their favorite superheroes and villains, from Black Panther to Thanos. Some of those characters, like Captain Carter, even made it into "Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness" before being hilariously torn apart by Scarlet Witch.

Now, Marvel Studios is teaming up with Industrial Light & Magic's Ilm Immersive group to deliver a virtual reality experience that will take MCU fans into the animated world of "What If...?" in order to stop variants of the multiverse from harnessing the power of the Infinity Stones. This is the first-ever interactive Disney+ original story, and it will be available exclusively on the Apple Vision Pro as a free app for a limited time. For those curious to see more, you can watch a trailer below that shows off the gameplay,...

On the heels of Naomi Kawase’s 2014 feature Still the Water getting distribution in North America from Film Movement, the distributor has now announced the Japanese director’s 2017 drama Radiance will get a release at the end of this month. Following a world premiere in competition at Cannes where it received the Ecumenical Jury Prize, we’re pleased to exclusively premiere the new U.S. trailer ahead of its April 28 debut.

Here’s the synopsis: “Misako (Ayame Misaki) is a writer of audio descriptions of films for the visually impaired. At a screening, she meets Nakamori (Masatoshi Nagase), an older photographer who is slowly losing his eyesight following an illness. Misako soon discovers Nakamori’s photographs, which will strangely bring her back to her past. Though hesitant to start a relationship, feelings soon arise between a man who has lost the light and a woman who pursues it.”

Kawase, whose...

Nearly a decade after its debut in competition at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered alongside the likes of Goodbye to Language, Winter Sleep, Clouds of Sils Maria, Maps to the Stars, and Two Days, One Night, Naomi Kawase’s drama Still the Water is getting a North American home courtesy of Film Movement. Ahead of a March 3 digital release, we’re exclusively debuting the new trailer for the film starring Nijirô Murakami, Junko Abe, Miyuki Matsuda, Tetta Sugimoto, and Makiko Watanabe.

On the subtropical Japanese island of Amami, traditions about nature remain eternal. Following a typhoon and during the full-moon night of traditional dances in August, 16-year-old Kaito (Nijirô Murakami) discovers a dead body floating in the sea. His girlfriend, Kyoko (Junko Abe), will attempt to help him understand this mysterious discovery. Together, Kaito and Kyoko will learn to become adults by experiencing the interwoven cycles of life,...

May on the Criterion Channel will be good to the auteurs. In fact they’re giving Richard Linklater better treatment than the distributor of his last film, with a 13-title retrospective mixing usual suspects—the Before trilogy, Boyhood, Slacker—with some truly off the beaten track. There’s a few shorts I haven’t seen but most intriguing is Heads I Win/Tails You Lose, the only available description of which calls it a four-hour (!) piece “edited together by Richard Linklater in 1991 from film countdowns and tail leaders from films submitted to the Austin Film Society in Austin, Texas from 1987 to 1990. It is Linklater’s tribute to the film countdown, used by many projectionists over the years to cue one reel of film after another when switching to another reel on another projector during projection.” Pair that with 2008’s Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach and your completionism will be on-track.

There’s nothing I love more than a film about food. I love almost everything about them. The mouth-watering shots. The ever-present nostalgia. The way they so easily lend themselves to philosophical ideas. It’s almost always a joy, even when the movie itself is mediocre. So, when I read the premise of Haruki Kadokawa final feature, “Mio’s Cookbook”, I had high hopes. A food film/period drama by a legendary producer and highly respected veteran director? On paper, it’s a perfect hybrid. Perhaps due to the fact that it was Kadokawa’s first big directorial effort since 1990 (“Heaven and Hell”), but against all odds, though, this adaptation of the popular series of novels by Kaoru Takada failed to stir the same feelings in me that so many other food films I’ve seen, and after an overlong runtime of two hours, whimpers its way to an unimpactful stop.

“True Mothers” by Kawase Naomi has been selected as Japan’s nominee for a best international feature film Academy Award. The Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, which supervises the selection process, made the announcement on Thursday.

Based on a novel by Tsujimura Miyuki, film focuses on a couple (Nagasaku Hiromi and Iura Arata) who adopt a child and, years later, are asked by its birth mother to return it.

A Cannes label selection, the film premiered at Toronto. It opened on Oct. 23 for commercial release in Japan.

The last Japanese film to be a finalist in the international film Oscar competition was Koreeda Hirokazu’s “Shoplifters” in 2019. Takita Yojiro ‘s “Departures” is the only Japanese film to win the award, in 2009.

“The director’s contemplation of motherhood and adoption (…) is her most plot-driven but least visually lustrous film yet,” wrote Variety in its review of the film. “Resembling the relationship-based ‘Sweet Bean,...

The director of The Mourning Forest returns with another sensitive film, this time about a difficult adoption, yet plot holes prove distracting

The Japanese auteur Naomi Kawase has returned with another of her highly distinctive, tremulously sensitive movies: heartfelt and unhurried, with a tendency to wash the screen in plangent sunlight as the camera looks plaintively up through the branches – and also, a borderline exasperating tendency towards a kind of pass-agg quietism. I have responded variously to this in the past: there was something underpowered in her sucrose drama Sweet Bean but real beauty in other films, such as her award-winning The Mourning Forest. And there is a sustained emotional seriousness in this movie, with committed performances.

Related: The Truffle Hunters review – strange and charming ode to rare dogs...

In the past few months during quarantine, we’ve seen filmmakers creating a number of different short-form projects and self-releasing them on their own channels. Now, the biggest project yet is arriving from Netflix as they’ve teamed with nearly 20 filmmakers who each made their own new short. They will now be released next week as part of the anthology film Homemade.

Featuring films by Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart (who will team together for their next film) as well as Ana Lily Amirpour, Antonio Campos, Rachel Morrison, Naomi Kawase, David Mackenzie, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paolo Sorrentino, and more, it’s an eclectic batch of work from all over the world.

“For once in our careers, this wasn’t about money, agencies, lawyers or the Hollywood structure,” producer Juan de Dios Larrain tells Variety. “This was a simple idea of [conveying] one message in five to seven minutes, and the idea was...

Poland’s New Europe Film Sales is handling worldwide sales rights to Mariko Bobrik’s feature debut “The Taste of Pho.” The food drama’s trailer is launching exclusively in Variety ahead of its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Culinary Cinema sidebar.

Described as a story about love, misunderstanding and food, “The Taste of Pho” follows Long, a Warsaw-based widowed Vietnamese cook who struggles to fit into the European culture, which his ten-year-old daughter Mia has already embraced as her own.

Born in Japan in 1983, Bobrik lives in Poland, where Vietnamese people make up one of the country’s biggest ethnic minorities.

“I didn’t want to portray a Japanese cook, because then the film would show a very specific person. Instead, I wanted to focus on someone who is seemingly quite ordinary. After that, the idea of a Vietnamese cook came about naturally,” she said.

Paris-based company Playtime and Japanese outfit Kino Intl. have boarded “Comes Morning” (“Asa ga Kuru”), the next project by revered Japanese director Naomi Kawase. The film started shooting last month in Tokyo.

Penned by Kawase and based on Mizuki Tsujimura’s bestselling novel of the same name, “Comes Morning” tells the story of a young couple, Satoko and her husband, Kiyokazu, who after a long and painful experience with fertility treatment decide to adopt a child. Six years later, they get a threatening phone call from a woman named Hikari, who pretends to be the biological mother of the child and who is ready to extort money from them.

“Everyone is somebody’s ‘child’ and was given birth [to] by ‘mother.’ And because of this fact, the core of this story will shake people’s heart, I believe,” said Kawase in a statement. “There lies the beginning of the world, seen...

Japanese auteur, Naomi Kawase has been selected to direct the official film of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. She won the contest with a proposal that demonstrated a “nuanced understanding of Japanese culture and Olympic values.”

Kawase is a regular at the Cannes film festival. Her works include “Sweet Bean,” “Suzaku,” and “Still The Water.”

The director of the official film must bring a unique editorial angle, and aim to capture the soul of a specific edition of the Olympics, while also considering the broader social and cultural context, the International Olympic Committee said. Kawase’s bid was chosen by Japanese film experts, international film experts, and the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage which advised the committee.

Previous directors of the official film include Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, and Carlos Saura. She is the fifth woman to direct the official film, following Caroline Rowland (London 2012), Gu Jun...

Award-winning Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase has been appointed to helm the official film of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. The selection was made by the International Olympic Committee in collaboration with the Organizing Committee of the Games who review proposals from the host nation’s top filmmaking talent. Kawase was chosen after close consultation among Tokyo 2020, Japanese film experts, international film experts and the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage who guides the production on behalf of the Ioc.

Kawase, who is a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, is the fifth woman to direct an Official Film, following the works of Caroline Rowland (London 2012), Gu Jun (Beijing 2008), Mai Zetterling (for one of the segments of the film Munich 1972) and Leni Riefenstahl (Berlin 1936).

She will also build on a legacy of more than 100 years of Olympic Film, including documentaries created for past Olympic Games that were held in Japan: Tokyo 1964 (Kon Ichikawa...

Award-winning trailblazing Japanese actress Kirin Kiki died on Sept. 15. Kiki recently appeared in Shoplifters and had been fighting cancer since being diagnosed in 2004, but the official cause of her death has yet to be announced. She was 75.

Kiki was born Keiko Nakatani in Tokyo in 1943. She started her acting career in the ’60s under the name Yuki Chihi in a theater troupe, where she met actor Shin Kishida. They would marry and then later divorce in 1968. In 1973, she married musician Yuya Uchida and they had a daughter Yayako.

She would go on to find success in TV in shows such as Shichinin no Mago (Seven Grandchildren) as well as Terauchi Kantaro Ikka (Kantaro Terauchi Family) and Jikandesuyo (It’s Time).

On the film side, she starred in Tokyo Tawa: Okan to Boku to Tokidoki Oton (Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad) and Chronicle of My Mother. The two...

While Naomi Kawase‘s cachet stateside hasn’t necessarily increased in the last few years, her last film, Sweet Bean, did manage to get a U.S. release. The Japanese filmmaker is now returning with her follow-up, Radiance (aka Hikari), which is set for a Japanese release at the end of May, hinting at a likely return to the Cannes Film Festival.

The first teaser trailer has landed, which previews the story of a film writer who meets a photographer who is losing his eyesight. Starring Masatoshi Nagase (last seen at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson), Ayame Misaki, and Tatsuya Fuji, check out the trailer below (via Cine Maldito), which is currently without subtitles, but we’ll update if they arrive.

Misako is a passionate writer of film versions for the visually impaired. At a screening, she meets Masaya, an older photographer who is slowly losing his eyesight.

With the population of Japan aging more and more, films that deal with the lives of the elderly have become somewhat of a trend, with films like “Sweet Bean“, “Pecoross’s Mother and Her Days”, and many more. “A Sparkle of Life” implements a rather humorous approach to the subject. The film was a huge hit in Japan, and even received praise from late theatre director Yukio Ninagawa who described it as “a movie that makes getting old Ok”.),

Tae Tsurumoto is a 77-year-old widow, who decides that she can still have a chance at love, and signs up with a matchmaking service. Ayako Tachibana, the attendant responsible for her case, is initially surprised a woman her age has decided to seek a matchmaking, but soon realizes that there are many other people Tae’s age in the company’s list. Subsequently, Tae meets a number of suitors, from every aspect of society,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Almost Holy (Steve Hoover)

The most fascinating part of Steve Hoover‘s latest documentary Almost Holy is how its subject Gennadiy Mokhnenko parallels the life of well-known Russian cartoon Krokodil Gena. The latter deals with a lonely crocodile zoo worker named Gena and his friend Cheburashka: a young, abandoned creature rejected by the establishment employing him. The two therefore construct a home for the lonely as...

Naomi Kawase’s film about the redemptive, life-affirming powers of a pancake recipe falls flat

Naomi Kawase is a Japanese director whose films command respect for their visual beauty and deeply felt reverence for the natural world. I admired this in Still the Water, Hanezu and her award-winning The Mourning Forest, while worrying about a certain fey self-consciousness. This is impossible to ignore in her latest movie, An, or Sweet Bean. The film has an impeccable technical finish but it is insipid, contrived, sentimental, and ever so slightly preposterous.

An old lady, Tokue (Kirin Kiki) one day shows up at a little street-food stand run by Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase), a dour, silent guy with troubles. He specialises in dorayaki, little pancakes filled with an, or bean paste. A regular customer is Wakana (Kyara Uchida), a teenage girl who is concerned about him. Tokue timidly but persistently asks if she can...

Prolific Japanese auteur Naomi Kawase has formed a remarkable career for herself in film with a distinct focus on those culturally neglected, autobiographic in her distinctively naturalistic approach, telling intimate stories of family, and in particular, the matriarchal presence within them. Her latest endeavour Sweet Bean remains perfectly in tune with her sensibilities as […]

The post Sweet Bean Review appeared first on HeyUGuys.

★★★☆☆ "Everything in the world has a story to tell," explains a character in Japanese director Naomi Kawase's new film Sweet Bean, which finally arrives in UK cinemas over year after its berth in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase) is the manager of a small bakery which specialises in a traditional Japanese pastry known as 'dorayaki'. The spring blossom drifts and yet Sentaro is not a happy man. He mechanically goes about his work to pay off an old debt and a lingering melancholy pervades his days along with a drink problem. He chats with a young school girl who has her own problems, namely with an inattentive mother.

Syrian war documentary set as opening film; Naomi Kawase and Crystal Moselle shorts selected.Scroll down for line-up

Venice Film Festival’s independent strand Venice Days has unveiled the line-up for its 13th edition, which runs alongside the main festival from Aug 31-Sept 10.

There are 11 titles in competition (10 world premieres), six special event screenings and two shorts on show.

Opening the programme will be Denmark-Finland co-pro The War Show [pictured] from co-directors Andreas Dalsgaard and Obaidah Zytoon. A documentary road film chronicling the Syrian uprising and war, the film sees Zytoon sets off on a road trip around Syria, telling the Syrian story through a series of personal intimate stories.

Italian titles in the line-up include Indivisible, Edoardo de Angelis’s story of two Neapolitan Siamese twin sisters who are exploited as a novelty singing act by their father. Rome-based sales agent True Colours boarded the film earlier this year.

The shorts – dubbed the Women’s Tales project...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

April and the Extraordinary World (Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci)

Most writing on Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci‘s April and the Extraordinary World speaks as though they’ve adapted one of revered Frenchman Jacques Tardi‘s graphic novels. This isn’t quite the case. What they’ve actually done is bring his unique “universe” to life with help from previous collaborator Benjamin Legrand (writer of...

Naomi Kawase's Sweet Bean (An)STORY70%DIRECTION67%ACTING75%VISUALS80%POSITIVESVery beautiful filmSublime acting by Kirin KikiElaboarate presentation of the Japanese way of cookingNEGATIVESThe film's major issues are not examined in depth2016-06-1773%Overall ScoreReader Rating: (0 Votes)0%

Cannes’ favourite Naomi Kawase presents another beautiful film, this time using food to present a social comment.

Tokue, a 76-year-old woman suffering from leprosy, discovers a pancake (dorayaki) stall during one of her morning walks. The owner, a bored and in debt middle-aged man named Sentaro, is searching for an assistant and the elderly woman does not hesitate to apply. Initially he refuses; however, upon her insistence and her pointing out a flaw in his recipe, he gives her a chance and ends up hiring her, impressed by her recipe for sweet red bean paste.

Tokue will live out her lifelong dream, cooking in the stall and flooding everything with her kind nature and positive energy,...

Sweet Bean (An) Kino Lorber Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya, d-based on Rotten Tomatoes Grade: B Director: Naomi Kawase Written by: Naomi Kawase based on Durian Sukegawa’s novel Cast: Kirin Kiki, Masatoshi Nagase, Kyara Uchida, Miyoko Asada, Etsuko Ichihara Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 2/17/16 Opens: March 18, 2016 Eating is a social occasion to such an extent that we may feel sorry for those, like business executives, who must often dine alone. People bond over food. State dinners are de rigeuer in much of the world, sharing of food helping along agreements between countries. And people bond as well over cooking. Though cooking at home is often a [ Read More ]

The post Sweet Bean Paste Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

In their biggest ever announcement, British distributor Eureka! Entertainment revealed a quartet of new acquisitions, as well as announced a number of upcoming releases on their Masters of Cinema and Eureka! Classics labels. Kawase Naomi's tender drama An (also known as Sweet Bean), Kurosawa Kiyoshi's latest thriller Creepy, Alex Ross Perry's Queen Of Earth and Tobias Nölle’s Aloys were all picked up at this year's Berlinale and will be released theatrically by Eureka, before hitting Blu-ray. Specific release details will be revealed later in the year, but Kurosawa and Perry both have titles in the Masters of Cinema series already, so it seems likely at least those two titles will follow suit. Robert Altman's That Cold Day In The Park (out 20 June, dual-format), Billy Wilder's...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

(When life hands you lemons, make sweet red bean paste!) Japanese director Kawase Naomi's film An (also known in some territories as Sweet Red Bean Paste) played at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this February, where it turned out to be a crowdpleaser. Audiences awarded it a whopping 4.5 out of 5, making it the highest rated Japanese film of the festival, placing it in the Top-5 even. Not bad for what -on paper at least- seems to be a pretty sugary "life's lessons" movie. While I managed to miss the film during its festival run, thankfully it arrived in Dutch art-house cinemas a few weeks later, allowing me to go see whyAn generated so much festival buzz. The result surprised me, and actually made...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Despite being one of the art cinema world’s most acclaimed filmmakers, director Naomi Kawase is a relative unknown when it comes to even the most studied cinephiles here stateside. Becoming arguably one of the most believed filmmakers at film festivals like, and particularly, the Cannes Film Festival, Kawase has amassed a career spawning some truly intriguing cinematic experiments, that simply haven’t hit a nerve with wide audiences. However, that will hopefully change with her newest, and most accessible, feature.

Entitled Sweet Bean, Kawase takes a decidedly traditional approach to this adaptation of a novel from Durian Sukeagwa, which itself looks and feels like a far cry from her last widely discussed feature, 2011’s Hanezu. The film introduces us to Sentaro, a quiet, unassuming owner of a small dorayaki shop in Tokyo. Dorayaki is ostensibly two small pancakes filled with a sweet red bean paste known as “an,” which...

With the 2015 awards season finally wrapped up, we can now genuinely look towards the year ahead. This month brings a handful of long-awaited festival hold-overs from last year, as well as a few promising studio titles. It should also be noted that essential restorations of Late Spring (3/4), River of Grass (3/11), A Brighter Summer Day (3/11), and Fireworks Wednesday (3/16) will be coming to select cities (and some beyond). If you’re in New York City, we’ll also be getting the grand opening of a new arthouse cinema — the Lower East Side’s Metrograph, which is dedicated to a mix of repertory and new releases.

Matinees to See: Songs My Brothers Taught Me (3/2), The Wave (3/4), Boy and the Beast (3/4), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (3/4), Creative Control (3/11), Eye in the Sky (3/11), Hello, My Name is Doris (3/11), Lolo (3/11), Marguerite (3/11), Remember (3/11), Hyena Road (3/11), The Little Prince (3/18), Too Late (3/18), The Program (3/18), and Born to be Blue (3/25).

10. Take Me to the River...

Despite her prolific output, with films often times making their way to the Cannes Film Festival, Naomi Kawase seems to go under-appreciated here in the United States due to the lack of distribution. Thankfully her latest drama, Sweet Bean (previously titled An and Sweet Red Bean Paste), was picked up by Kino Lorber and will be arriving next month. Following the story of a small bakery, it was one of our favorite dramas of Cannes last year and today brings the U.S. trailer.

We said in our review, “Contributing immeasurably to this empathetic tone is Kiki’s soulful, splendidly unaffected performance. Playing someone with a sad secret to guard and a militantly cheerful exterior as defense, this portrayal could have gone off the sappy or the farcical end so easily. Instead, she succeeds in first tricking you into seeing this harmlessly wacky old lady who talks to red beans and greets birds,...