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The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) today revealed the lineup for its 37th edition, which includes world premieres of features from China, Japan and Hong Kong among its competition strands.

The festival, which is set to run from October 28 to November 6, will include 120 films and three series across the 10 main sections. The selection was made from 2,023 entries, up from 1,942 last year.

Scroll down for full competition lists

The majority of the 15-strong Competition strand hails from Asia with three films from Japan and three from China as well as titles from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Kazakhstan.

The films from Japan...

The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) today revealed the lineup for its 37th edition, which includes world premieres of features from China, Japan and Hong Kong among its competition strands.

The festival, which is set to run from October 28 to November 6, will include 120 films and three series across the 10 main sections. The selection was made from 2,023 entries, up from 1,942 last year.

Scroll down for full competition lists

The majority of the 15-strong Competition strand hails from Asia with three films from Japan and three from China as well as titles from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Kazakhstan.

The films from Japan...

The Tokyo International Film Festival has unveiled a competition section with as many Chinese titles as Japanese for its 37th edition.

Announced on Wednesday the festival’s full lineup runs to a compact 110 films, culled from a huge 2,023 applications, and functions partly as discovery event, partly as a Japanese showcase and also as best-of the year international art house compendium.

The 15-title competition includes Midi Z’s “The Unseen Sister,” “Big World,” by Yang Lina and “My Friend An Delie,” by Dong Zijian from China. Adding rising star Hong Kong director Philip Yung’s “Papa” and Huang Xi’s Sylvia Chang-starring “Daughter’s Daughter,” fresh from Toronto, and the competition will resound to Chinese accents. From Japan comes “She taught Me Serendipity,” by Ohku Akiko, “Teki Cometh,” by Yoshida Daihachi and “Lust in the Rain,” which is a Japan-Taiwan coproduction directed by Katayama Shinzo.

Other competition selections include “The Englishman’s Papers,...

A trio of French sales houses have made a flurry of appointments ahead of the summer break and before the autumn festival season.

Núria Palenzuela Camon has joined Paris-based Indie Sales as head of festivals and will co-run marketing alongside the company’s sales executive Constance Poubelle. She is taking over for Clement Chautant who is heading to French arthouse distributor Arizona Distribution to lead on acquisitions.

Palenzuela Camon is fresh off a four-year stint as head of festivals and marketing at sales outfit Totem Films. Salomé Rizk will take over in the same position at Totem after running the festivals team for Loco Films.

Malaysian drama Snow In Midsummer and Danish feature Sons have won the top prizes at the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s (Hkiff) Firebird Awards.

Snow In Midsummer, directed by Chong Keat-aun, won the Firebird Award for best film in the Chinese-language Young Cinema Competition. The film, which premiered in Venice’s Giornate Degli Autori section last September, revisits the tragic race riots that occurred in Kuala Lumpur on May 13, 1969.

Gustav Moller’s Sons won the top Firebird Award in the World category. The Denmark-Sweden co-production, about a prison officer who is faced with a dilemma when a young man...

Oscar contenders and Berlin prize-winners will be among the European films represented by visiting companies to FilMart that are making use of the European Film Promotion umbrella stand within the annual Hong Kong market.

In total, 29 European film sales companies are making the trip, including more than a dozen from France under the Unifrance banner. Prominent rights brokers include Charades, Goodfellas, Fandango and Filmax.

“Efp has built up the European brand at Hong Kong for many years through setting up a prominent umbrella. The aim was always to prominently flag our mission as being the one-stop shop for the European industry and European films,” said Efp executive Susanne Davis. “And we’re happily surprised that so many of them are taking advantage.”

The 29 companies are collectively representing over 140 new European titles, including Oscar contender “Anatomy of a Fall,” represented by MK2 Films, while “Four Daughters” is handled by the Party Film Sales.

This month’s Hong Kong International Film Festival will showcase over 190 films from 62 countries and regions, including five world premieres, and 64 Asian premieres.

Running 12 days (March 28 – April 8), the festival will open with the Asian premiere of local director Ray Yeung’s “All Shall Be Well,” which won the Teddy Award at the recent Berlin festival.

The closing film is the Asian premiere of “All the Long Nights,” directed by Miyake Sho and starring Matsumura Hokuto and Kamishiraishi Mone, which also premiered in Berlin. Variety’s review of “Nights” called it “gently luminous.”

Chinese-language films selected for the Firebird competition include: “Borrowed Time,” “Brief History of a Family,” “Carefree Days,” Fresh off Markham,” “A Journey in Spring,” “Snow in Midsummer,” “Some Rain Must Fall” and “A Song Sung Blue.”

Foreign films for the Firebird competition’s other section include: “Arcadia,” “Arni,” “Ivo,” “Pepe,” “Sons,” “Sujo,” “The Tenants” and “Who Do I Belong to.

Ivo (Minna Wündrich) spends her days tending to terminally ill patients. In her capacity as a palliative care nurse, she’s not responsible for saving them — that’s the doctors’ concern — though this 40-ish single mother does her best to listen to their complaints and ease their pain. It can be a draining experience, both physically and emotionally, and Ivo sometimes bends the rules in ways that make her at once more relatable and less saintly than her job might suggest.

With “Ivo,” writer-director Eva Trobisch doesn’t dwell on the morality of her title character’s choices, focusing more on the tension between this woman’s optimism and the weight of her work. Trobisch’s tough, observational drama builds on the promise of her 2018 debut, “All Is Good,” about a young woman determined not to let a sexual assault derail her life. Here, the German filmmaker delivers another stripped-down,...

Exclusive: Ingo Fliess, producer of director Ilker Çatak’s German International Feature Film Oscar nominee The Teachers’ Lounge, tells Breaking Baz that he has partnered with Munich-based Trimafilm to explore “common” projects.

Fliess’ production outfit If… Productions will start work with Trimafilm on a prestige television mini-series being developed for Çatak and Eva Trobisch, who works alongside Trimafilm’s founder Mariko Minoguchi as a writer and director, and whose film Ivo will play at the forthcoming Berlinale.

Both the If… Productions and Trimafilm outfits enjoy a similar flair for smart and socially aware movies, and for passionately made documentaries. Trimafilm’s releases include the feature film All Is Well and the documentary Iron Butterflies.

Fliess explained that last year his company decided to share office space with Trimafilm while “remaining two independent companies” who are in constant exchange “of ideas about directors, scripts, about ideas and having many synergies.” He stressed,...