Friday, March 21, 2008

Japan Film Festival: Talk and Symposium

Hi Blog,

Sorry for the radio silence-- or is that blog silence?Anyway, there's a new member of the family now-- and my time has been very happily taken up by her.

Next month, here in LA, there will be a Japanese film festival called appropriately: The Japan Film Festival. I have been asked to participate in the symposium on April 5th entitled: "Japanese Films in the US: Past, Present and Future."

As part of this, I will be giving a 15-20 minute talk about Japanese films in the US (the exact topic of which I am working out at the moment) and then will be participating in a moderated conversation.

From the JFF site:
UCLA Symposium (presented by JFFLA and UCLA-JABA)

Date & Time: April 5th (Sat) Entrance opens at 3pm
Start at 3:15pm
Close about 7pm

Venue:  UCLA Anderson School of Management Korn Hall, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095

Theme: Japanese Films in the US: Past, Present, and Future

The actual Japan Film Festival will run from the 11th to the 17th of April at the newly built Imaginasian Theater here in downtown LA. I wrote about its opening here.

The fest will then continue on from the 18th through the 20th, at the Starplex Cinemas in Irvine. All of this info, along with the list of films playing can be found on their site.

I will add that one of the most exciting films that they're showing, which I plan to catch is Nakajima Ryo's PIA Film Fest award winning feature THIS WORLD OF OURS. Jason Gray was the first person I know of to raise world awareness to this film and considering his high praise, I'm very excited to see it. (Jason Gray's post.)

More info to come...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I started to think recently about how theres potential for countries currently experiencing a certain amount of revival in international interest to be handing over - unwhittingly, maybe - their biggest tool in holding back the dominance of American film, by not growing towards managing their representation abroad. quickest way may be subbed discs, more effective any long-term would be distribution. america currently manages to pick for itself the way in which many are taking their initial broader pop culture lessons in where countries are broadly currently at, and this, considering their dominance in non-domestic fields, is a strange way of making sure the battle to popularise this stuff results in little more than a token gesture of whats being made, how it can be perceived, portrayed. there also remains the problem of how one country can never entirely absorb the handling of another countries film output, especially when a local Market has dynamics that shift to make it hard to handle in and of itself... and, its worth noting that theres the potential for interest to outstrip supply, leaving us with an already growing diversity of taste, more and more fansubbers working on live action films, and the risk of a situation like the randomly collapsing American anime Market.