Tokyo Film Festival unveils line-up

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Competition section includes six world premieres and titles from Koji Fukada, Jun Robles Lana and Lee Ju-hyoung.

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The 26th Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) has announced its line-up with six world premieres in the Competition section including Hospitalité director Koji Fukada’s Au revoir l’été, Jun Robles Lana’s previous HAF project Barber’s Tales and the Kim Ki-duk-produced Red Family.

Those that are not world premieres are all Asian premieres including Aaron Fernandez’s San Sebastian entry The Empty Hours.

Chen Kaige, the Chinese director behind Farewell My Concubine, will head the competition jury. He will be joined by Korean actress Moon So-ri (Oasis), Australian producer Chris Brown (Daybreakers), US director-writer-producer Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon), and Japanese actress Shinobu Terajima (Caterpillar).

TIFF is set to run Oct 17-25 with new festival head Yasushi Shiina putting an emphasis on showcasing homegrown productions and discovering Asian talent.

The newly launched Asian Future section is a competition for first and second-time Asian directors.

The eight films in this section include the world premiere of Ravi Kumar’s India-UK co-production A Prayer For Rain, based on the true events of a fatal pesticide leak in India, and Kim Jung-hoon’s Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) graduation film Stray Dogs, in which a bomb maker faces down a bomb detonator.

The Asian Future Jury is comprised of Japanese director Shinji Aoyama (Tokyo Park), Hong Kong International Film Festival programmer Jacob Wong and Japanese critic Koichi Nojima.

The newly created Japanese Cinema Splash section features nine world premieres of local indie films including Takuji Suzuki’s “A Band Rabbit” And A Boy, based on Kei Nakazawa’s coming-of-age novel and Hirobumi Watanabe’s And The Mud Ship Sales Away, produced by Tochigi-based filmmaking collective Foolish Piggies Films.

The Japanese Cinema Splash jury is made up of Cannes Film Festival deputy general delegate Christian Jeune, Japanese director Takahisa Zeze (Heaven’s Story) and Doha Film Institute program advisor and Venice Film Festival correspondent Paolo Bertolin.

Special Screenings include the world premieres of Japanese animations Bayonetta Bloody Fate, based on the popular game, and DokiDoki! Pretty Cure Memories For The Future, the movie version of a long-running TV animation.

“Taiwanese Cinema Renaissance 2013” will have films such as Chung Mong-hong’s recent Jimmy Wong-starrer Soul, which is Taiwan’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language category at the Academy Awards, and the digitally restored version of 1983 episodic film The Sandwich Man, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wan Jen and Tseng Chuang-hsiang.

As opening film, Paul Greengrass’ Tom Hanks-starrer Captain Phillips is amongst the films making a local premiere. Koki Mitani’s The Kiyosu Conference, based on the novel of the same title, is the closing film.

World Focus has talked-about films from around the festival circuit such as Alex van Warmerdam’s Dutch film Borgman (another Oscar submission), Lav Diaz’s 250-minute historical Filipino opus No Need and Xavier Dolan’s Canada-France co-production Tom At The Farm.