The location for the Skip City International D-Cinema Festival doesn't make it particularly easy for casual fans to pop in. The Skip City complex — which hosts studios for audiovisual production, as well as educational and entertainment facilities — is a fairly lengthy bus ride from Kawaguchi Station in Saitama Prefecture.

The "D" stands for "digital," and since its launch in 2004, when digital films were still struggling to win acceptance from industry traditionalists, Skip City has served as an incubator of talent and a promoter of digital formats (which have now almost completely taken over said industry). Festival award winners include Kazuya Shiraishi ("Dawn of the Felines"), Ryota Nakano ("Her Love Boils Bathwater") and Yuichiro Sakashita ("Any Way the Wind Blows") —all of whom have gone on to have successful careers.

The award winners at the 14th and latest edition of Skip City, which took place from July 15 to 23, included Norwegian director Arild Andresen, who won the Grand Prize in the Feature Length Competition for "Handle with Care," a drama about the rocky relationship between a widowed Norwegian man and his adopted Colombian son. Shot in Norway and Colombia, the film told perceptive truths about a taboo subject: A single father who cannot love his unruly young son and contemplates returning him to his birth mother.