Tokyo FILMeX 2023 runs from November 23rd to December 01st.
The venues chosen are Marunouchi Toei and Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (screening schedule) and the films getting screened have featured in some of the autumn festivals I have covered and a brand new one featuring Lily Franky in the Philippines.
Click on the links to be taken to pages with more images.
Competition Film
Winter in Sokcho / Hiver a Sokcho
Release Date: N/A
Duration: 82 mins.
Director: Koya Kamura
Writer: Koya Kamura, Stephane Ly-Cuong (Screenplay), Elisa Shua Dusapin (Original Novel)
Starring: Roschdy Zem, Bella Kim,
This one is based on an award-winning novel by French-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin. This review of the book makes it sound fascinating. Koya Kamura is a French-Japanese director who was born in Paris. Koya Kamura is a French-Japanese director who was born in Paris.
Synopsis: Winter has set in around the fishing town of Sokcho. The tourism trail has gone to sleep and the town is relatively close to the North Korean border, so people have extra reason to stay indoors. At a sleepy guesthouse is a woman of French-Korean descent who is has completed her university studies and is due to get married. Living with a certain diffidence, her life is unsatisfying but comes to life when a French graphic novelist looking for inspiration visits Sokcho. She acts as a guide for this man who is old enough to be her father and a tense, borderline romantic acquaintanceship ensues…
Special Screenings
ザ・ゲスイドウズ 「Za Gesuidouzu」
Release Date: 2025
Duration: 93 mins.
Director: Kenichi Ugana
Writer: Kenichi Ugana (Screenplay),
Starring: Natsuko, Leo Imamura, Yutaka Kyan, Rocko Zevenbergen, Yuya Endo,
Website Twitter: IMDB
Kenichi Ugana (Visitors – Complete Edition) is fast rising in the film world following Extraneous Matter – Complete Edition at Nippon Connection a few years ago. His sci-fi/horror genre tales are perfect for genre festivals and this film, which comes out in 2025, plays at Midnight Madness at Toronto.
Synopsis: A misfit horror-themed rock band moves to the Japanese countryside to write the greatest punk anthem in the world.
Pre-Screening
コンプリシティ優しい共犯 「Konpurishitei Yasashii Kyouhan」
Release Date: January 17th, 2020
Duration: 116 mins.
Director: Kei Chikaura
Writer: Kei Chikaura (Screenplay),
Starring: Yulai Lu, Tatsuya Fuji, Sayo Akasaka, Kio Matsumoto, Fusako Urabe,
This China-Japan co-production seems to be a continuation of the director’s short film Signature which also stars Yulai Lu. That short featured him playing a Chinese immigrant wandering around Shibuya.
Synopsis: A Chinese man named Chen Liang (Lu Yulai) left China and his ill mother and elderly grandmother to live in Japan. He wanted to escape his responsibilities and have a new life but he finds himself experiencing the hardships that come with living illegally in Japan but it looks like things might change for the better when he takes a phone call meant for someone else and accepts a job at a traditional Japanese soba restaurant run by an elderly chef (Tatsuya Fuji). He takes to learning the art of soba-preparation, however, his illegal status could put things in jeopardy.
Made in Japan
The Height of the Coconut Trees
椰子の高さ 「Yashi no takasa」
Release Date: 2025
Duration: 100 mins.
Director: Du Jie
Writer: Du Jie (Screenplay),
Starring: Minami Ohba, Soichiro Tanaka, Seita Shibuya, Mado Karasumori,
Du Jie, best known as a cinematographer on films like Mongolian Ping Pong (2005) and No Man’s Land (2013), emigrated to Japan three years ago. He makes his directorial debut with The Height of Coconut Trees.
Synopsis: This film tells a story blending past and present, reality and ghosts, all centred on two couples, one of a chef and his lover who works in a pet shop and to whom he gives a ring he finds in a fish, the other consisting of a woman who has committed suicide and her partner who acquired the inn in which she did the act. When the woman who received the ring visits the old inn alone, the owner suspects she might commit suicide and starts following her around…
ユリシーズ 「Yurishi-zu」
Release Date: 2024
Duration: 73 mins.
Director: Hikaru Uwagawa
Writer: Hikaru Uwagawa, (Screenplay),
Starring: Alevtina Tikhonova, Dimitri Tikhonov, Izumi Ishii, Enaitz Zulaika, Hikaru Uwagawa, Kazuko Hara
This was at the Marseille International Film Festival and information was on that site. One of the past works of the director is the 2019 short A Portrait of the Young Man as a Young Man which, when coupled with this feature’s title, indicates his fascination with James Joyce.
The accompanying interview on the festival site reveals he also makes links directly to Homer’s “The Odyssey”. It’s all in the drawn comparisons between himself, as an immigrant studying filmmaking in Spain experiencing his ambivalent feelings to being abroad from home, and Ulysses who may have felt similar emotions. Therefore, he made this film as a parody of Homer’s Odyssey in a way that James Joyce did with his novel.
The interview is fascinating and goes on to describe the artistic process, including further influences and not using a script but relying on a diary, dictionaries, collages, and more to guide the film. This is a three-part film and it was partly shot in San Sebastian and the director’s own grandmother features in it.
Synopsis: This film contains the stories of three groups of people living in Spain and Japan and each story, despite being standalone, are joined together by ideas of displacement and longing for home. The first is set in Madrid and concerns a young Russian woman who has lived alone with her eight-year-old son ever since her husband left them to “hunt for treasure”. We are next taken to San Sebastian where a Japanese traveller spends time with a young Basque woman and enters her life briefly. The final story is set in Maniwa, Japan, and a young man returns to his family home for the Obon ceremony in honour of his grandfather.
雪解けのあと（仮） 「Yukidoke no ato (kari)」
Release Date: N/A
Duration: 110 mins.
Director: Lo Yi-shan
Writer: N/A
Starring: Lo Yi-shan, Liang Sheng-yueh, Liu Chen-chun,
Synopsis: This Taiwanese-Japanese co-production is the debut film from Lo Yi-shan. It maps a self-documentary of mourning onto a tragedy involving her best friend, Chun, who died while trekking in Nepal with her boyfriend, Yue. The two were trapped in a cave in the mountains for 47 days due to unseasonable snowfall, but Chun died three days before their rescue. Yueh and Chun had made a promise to each other: the survivor must tell their story to Lo, who had planned to join them on their Nepalese journey. To fulfil this promise, Lo questions Yueh and eventually retraces Chun’s footsteps to the cave which is where Lo must find meaning in the loss of her best friend.
Through a mixture of home video and letters, voice recordings and photographs and news reports and physically retracting Chun’s footsteps, the viewer and Lo go on this journey. The Japanese aspect comes in how the director considered how to compose and edit the film while staying in Yamagata.
Release Date: N/A
Duration: 102 mins.
Director: Janus Victoria
Writer: Janus Victoria (Screenplay)
Starring: Lily Franky, Marua Isabel Lopez, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Charlie Dizon, Vikash Paliwal,
Janus Victoria (info) is a Filipina who has worked in the Philippines and Japan on documentaries and dramas. Diamonds in the Sand is based on “kodokushi” – lonely death – and she has made a short about this subject already. It is named Encounters with Silence.
This was written about by Variety during the Hong Kong Asian Film Financing Forum which expands on the phenomena and how it ties into this film:
Developed and directed by Janus Victoria, the film [Diamonds in the Sand] started as an exploration of the Japanese phenomenon of kodokushi, or lonely death, where elderly people who live alone are discovered dead only months after their passing due to the isolated lives that they lead.
Her feature film has cinematography by Akiko Ashizawa, a veteran of the Japanese film scene and further afield with Indonesian and Chinese works. She is most associated with lensing Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s works from the 2000s and 2010s.
Synopsis: The film follows Yoji, a divorced businessman who has just lost his caring mother. With few significant relationships left, he realises that his life is empty. The discovers of the decomposing body of an elderly neighbour he never got to know, an encounter with a Filipina caregiver named Minerva, and a fear of being alone inspires him to head to Manila with Minerva where, amidst the chaos and discomfort, he finds the promise of human connection and a renewal of life.
Past Coverage: