Back in May, the rumor among cinephiles in the Japanese media was that the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) wouldn't happen this year. The mood was that it was too soon after the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 to hold anything festive, especially in the visual-arts scene. All over Japan, souls were aching from watching the endless news of destruction and sorrow in the Tohoku region — intensified for many by the amount of first-hand footage of the disaster posted on video-streaming websites. However, it just seemed disrespectful to want to watch anything else.
TIFF programming director Nobushige Toshima maintains, though, that scrapping the event was never on the cards.
"A mere week after the disaster, my staff and I went to the Hong Kong Film Festival," Toshima says, "and we were surprised and touched that so many people expressed such concern for Japan and even started a spontaneous fundraiser for Tohoku. So we set up a fundraising booth of our own and, in the process, discovered a trite but fundamental truth — movies do bring people together."