Focus on Japan at Osians filmfest in Delhi from July 20

New Delhi, July 18: More than 20 films from Japan, which gave to the world masters like Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, will be screened at the ninth edition of the Osian's film festival of Asian and Arab monies beginning in the capital from Friday.

Around 140 films from more than 35 countries are to be screened during the Festival, which will commence in the capital on Friday evening with the international premiere of Iranian filmmaker Babak Shirinshefat's film 'Raami', an Iran-Azerbaijan co-production set in the backdrop of the period post the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The ten-day festival, screenings for which are to be held at the Siri Fort Auditorium, the Alliance Francaise, PVR Plaza and the PVR Rivoli, will come to a close on July 29 with the screening of the Egyptian film 'Cut and Paste' by Hala Khalil. A gentle satire, 'Cut and Paste' is a grim look at problems face by the Egyptian society.

This year's edition of the festival, with a tagline 'Recreating cinematic culture', will have a focus on Japan with a tribute to Kenji Mizoguchi.

As part of its focus on Japan, the festival will screen a number of contemporary Japanese and Samurai films.

Also accompanying this focus are unique Japanese poster designs of World cinema. Also on display will be one of the biggest exhibitions from the realm of magic and fiction, cinematic artworks from the realm of Horror and Science fiction, and displays of the legendary divas of world cinema as well as a gigantic display of 50 great Indian female stars.

The Focus on Japan, which is part of the programme of the Indo-Japan Friendship Year, will be inaugurated on July 21 at 1830 hrs at Siri Fort II by the Ambassador of Japan to India, Yasukuni Inoki, and the Indian Foreign Secretary, Shiv Shankar Menon.

It will be launched with the screening of The Water Magician (1933), a silent film by Kenji Mizoguchi. It will be accompanied by a live benshi performance, the first such performance in this part of the world.

This performance transports the audience to the golden age of cinema when silent films were accompanied by a narrator - the 'Benshi'. The festival will screen Mizugachi's silent 1933 masterpiece 'The Water Magician' with a narration by one of the world's leading benshis, Yuko Saito.

In the era of silent films, the benshi or the narrator/commentator stood at the side of the movie screen and introduced and related the story to the audience to the accompaniment of a live orchestra.

Ms. Yuko Saito, a renowned Japanese benshi artiste, will recreate that very special cinema ambience.

The word 'benshi' is a shortened form of the compound 'katsudo benshi' meaning 'moving picture narrators'. In theatrical style, benshi often spoke for the characters onscreen and played multiple roles. These legendary film narrators of the silent period were stars of their times in their own right.

Ms Saito is a renowned artiste who specialises in freewheeling period films, romance action films and melodramas. She has also worked as magic assistant and comedienne in mizugei (water show) and wazuma (magic) performances with the Nihon Majutsudan (Japan Magic Company), and takes part in producing performances and touring of elementary, junior high and high schools throughout Japan. She is coming to India at the behest of Matsuda Film Productions and Digital Meme, pioneers in salvaging and restoring lost Japanese film classics.

A special feature of the Focus is a Tribute to Kenji Mizoguchi, one of Japan's great masters, and a contemporary of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. Regarded as quintessentially Japanese, Mizoguchi's films constitute a self-contained, unified world and offer something that cannot be found anywhere else. By the time he died in 1956 at the age of 58, the prolific director had made 75 films, of which nine are being screened at the Osian's-Cinefan.

The Focus on Japan will also feature Samurai films. Whereas the production of samurai films in Japan has fallen sharply in recent times, high quality samurai films continue to be made.

Even satiric comedies that are humorous and effective subversions of the genre are being made.

Another strand of this section will be the presentation of contemporary Japanese cinema. Family drama, fantasy and modern fairy tales mingling the real and the surreal, illusion and reality, these films reflect the refreshing and eclectic nature of what Japan has to offer today.

The Osian's-Cinefan 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award to an Author/ Critic/ Scriptwriter for Distinguished Contribution to Cinema will be presented to author, historian, critic, curator, educationist and film administrator Tadao Sato who is one of Japan's most versatile and prolific writers on cinema.

Author of more than 130 books, he has also been an editor and, with his wife Hisako, publisher of several movie magazines. He is currently President of the Japan Academy of Moving Images and Director of the Focus on Asia Fukuoka International Film Festival.

Tadao Sato has received many national honours including the Kawakita Prize which he and his wife won jointly, as well as awards conferred by the governments of France, Korea and Vietnam.

Sato will give a talk on Mizoguchi and Japanese cinema on 23 July at 1515 hrs in Siri Fort III.

Rounding off the focus will be a special exhibition of Japanese Posters of World Cinema from the Osian's archive - one of the world's finest collections of Japanese film poster art. Unique Oriental aesthetics illustrating the classics of world cinema have resulted in some of the most unusual and intriguing iconography in film poster design.

The unusual, long and narrow format of a selection of Japanese posters of European films is perhaps an outcome of an original western poster iconography being reworked to accommodate the Japanese textual characters - as in the posters of La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968).

There are Japanese poster designs of Clint Eastwood and Marlon Brando films, European New Wave classics by Agnes Varda, Francois Truffaut and Alain Resnais and of home-grown Japanese epics (Mizoguchi's Crucified Lovers, 1953 and Ugetsu), as well as a glimpse of the Polish poster art of Japanese cinema.

Apart from Mr Tsuguhiko Kadokawa, Chairman of the Tokyo International Film Festival, around twelve guests from Japan, including filmmakers, critics and scholars are expected to be present during the ten day film festival.

UNI