For foreign residents, monolingual or no, Tokyo International Film Festival offers a good chance to see new Japanese films with subtitles, especially in three of the main sections: Competition, Special Screenings and Japanese Eyes.
In the Competition section this year, two Japanese films will vie for the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix, TIFF's biggest prize: Kaneto Shindo's "Ichimai no Hagaki (Post Card)" and Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's "Kaitan-shi Jokei (Sketches of Kaitan City)." The world's second-oldest active director (Manoel de Oliveira, 100, is the oldest), Shindo, 98, has said that the World War II home-front drama "Ichimai no Hagaki" will be his last film. Its world premiere screening at TIFF will be a chance, hopefully not the final one, to see Shindo on stage and in person.
"Kaitan-shi Jokei" is based on a novel of the same name by Yasushi Sato, a writer often compared with his contemporary Haruki Murakami but who died in 1990 before he could reach his full potential. The film portrays ordinary lives in the titular Hokkaido town, a fictional stand-in for Sato's native Hakodate. Director Kumakiri has worked in a variety of genres since debuting with the student-radicals-turned- killers shocker "Kichiku Dai Enkai (Kichiku: Banquet of the Beasts)" in 1997, but his best, most incisive work portrays society's losers and loners, such as Maki Sakai's failed actress in 1998's "Nonko 36-sai (Kaji-tetsudai)."