Almost every year at the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) at least one film by a new Japanese director gets talked up by visiting programmers, journalists and critics as a find.
Last year one such buzz film was Seiji Tanaka's debut feature, "Melancholic." I was among its fans, telling all and sundry that it was the most original film I had seen at the festival. The jury of the Japanese Cinema Splash section, where the film had its world premiere, validated this assessment by awarding Tanaka its best director prize.
Based on his original script, the film had a budget of ¥3 million that Tanaka and his producer and star Yoji Minagawa had scraped together. It had to be shot over the course of several weekends, since Tanaka was working a full-time job at the time.