The first Edinburgh International Film Festival under new artistic director Shane Danielsen will pay tribute to the Japanese director Kon Ichikawa with a retrospective of 11 of his films spanning the decade 1953 to 1963.

Now 86 years old, Ichikawa originally studied animation and made his cinema debut with the puppet feature A Girl Of Dojo Temple (1946). His early satirical comedies gained him a reputation as the 'Japanese Frank Capra' but he is best known to Western audiences for his powerful anti-War films of the 1950s and his bleak dramas of obsessive individuals. Among the titles to be screened at Edinburgh are The Burmese Harp (1956), Conflagration (1958), Fires On The Plain (1959) and An Actor's Revenge (1963).