Japan is out in force at this year’s Berlinale. It follows a record-breaking year at the local box office led by the likes of Oscar-nominated Kokuho and anime Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba — Infinity Castle, which became Japan’s highest-grossing film of all time internationally. Now Japan is set to showcase a raft of features in Berlin from leading filmmakers and rising talents.
In Competition is A New Dawn, an animated film that marks the debut feature of director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya. The multi-hyphenate Japanese-style painter, animator, illustrator, character designer and screenwriter has anime credits including multiple titles helmed by Makoto Shinkai, the director of the 2016 hit Your Name.
Shinomiya, who served as a unit director and key animator on Your Name as well as Shinkai’s The Garden Of Words, says the lessons learned working with a master filmmaker proved inspirational. “Back then, I wanted to make anime but didn’t know how,” he says. “Seeing Mr Shinkai’s minimalist workspace, where he made anime with just one PC, was a great lesson.
“My work tends to focus on the relationship between the individual and society and the issues that arise from it. This film is the result of my constant research for how to use anime to translate those themes into entertainment.”
A New Dawn centres on a young man who lives in an abandoned fireworks factory that has been slated for demolition. He is determined to unravel the mystery of a mythical firework created by his father before he disappeared and launch it ahead of the factory’s closure.
Shinomiya, who devised the concept and wrote the screenplay, says the inspiration came from a new appreciation of the Japanese landscape following the birth of his child. “One day, my child spotted the ‘sea’ through a gap in the woods and asked me about it,” he recalls. “Where we were, a view of the sea should have been impossible. Staring intently, it turned out to be a row of solar panels. Such changes in the Japanese landscape could be looked at negatively, but my child — a member of the next generation — offered a fresh interpretation, which struck me as profoundly meaningful. In that instant, this film’s story began to move forward.”
Fresh style
A New Dawn is a co-production between Japan’s Asmik Ace and Studio Outrigger and France’s Miyu Productions, who previously worked on several anime films, including 2024’s award-winning Ghost Cat Anzu.
Working with Miyu helped give the film “a fresh visual style”, says Shinomiya: “There were challenges to overcome in terms of work style and time difference, but Miyu proactively proposed ways they could contribute to the story. As a result, scenes produced ended up longer and denser than planned.”
On the animation front, Japan is represented by a further two titles: Yusuke Hirota’s Chimney Town: Frozen In Time and Kawajiri Yoshiaki’s 1993 classic Ninja Scroll.
The former, playing in Generation Kplus, is the sequel to Poupelle Of Chimney Town, which was one of Japan’s highest-grossing films in 2021. The new film, also based on a popular picture book by Akihiro Nishino and animated at legendary animation house Studio 4oC, tracks the further adventures of children in a polluted, chimney-filled city.
Ninja Scroll, in Berlinale Classics, is a seminal anime about a mercenary swordsman roaming feudal Japan. It helped fuel an explosion of interest in Japanese animation in the west in the 1990s, alongside the likes of Ghost In The Shell, which laid the foundations for the ongoing interest in anime worldwide.
Berlinale Classics is also home to The Pornographers, director Shohei Imamura’s erotic comedy from 1966 about a suburban family man who earns his living through DIY pornographic films. Considered one of multiple Palme d’Or winner Imamura’s best and most provocative, it is presented in a new 4K remaster and receives its world premiere in Berlin.
‘Big tales’
Featured in Panorama is Numb, the latest from director Takuya Uchiyama. Best known for 2024 thriller The Young Strangers, Uchiyama wrote and helmed this semi-autobiographical feature that stars up-and-coming actor Takumi Kitamura (Baka’s Identity) as a young man returning to his coastal hometown after a childhood of abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents.
The cast also includes veterans Rie Miyazawa (The Twilight Samurai) and Masatoshi Nagase (Kokuho). Uchiyama, who shot Numb on 16mm film to create a documentary feel, has described the film as “a big tale about a small world”.
In Forum are Masayume by Nao Yoshigai and AnyMart by Yusuke Iwasaki. Masayume is a hybrid documentary featuring family archives, animation and performance art. The film centres on director Yoshigai, who retreats to a Zen temple to grieve the death of her mother, which has caused her to lose mental and physical balance. This version has its world premiere in Berlin after an earlier cut was screened at Japan’s Aichi Arts Center in 2024. Yoshigai, who is also a dancer and choreographer, was selected for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2019 with short Grand Bouquet and Rotterdam in 2022 with Shari.
Yusuke Iwasaki’s AnyMart, described as a socially critical horror film, takes place in a convenience store that serves as a microcosm of Japanese society. It is the feature debut of Iwasaki, a commercial director whose psychological horror short Void played at Rotterdam in 2024. AnyMart is produced by Tokyo-based production house Nothing New, founded in 2022 to help rising Japanese talent go global, and stars Shota Sometani, whose credits include Parasyte and 100 Meters.
Japan is also represented in two international co-productions: Narrative, featured in the Forum Expanded section; and Sleep No More, which plays in Berlinale Special Midnight.
Narrative is directed by lauded Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong and stages a fictionalised trial after the massacre of protesters in Bangkok in 2010, for which no-one was held accountable. It is a co-production between producers in Thailand, South Korea and Japan, including the Tokyo-based Matataki Films, founded by Anocha, Gohey Miyoshi and Paul Mori. Anocha’s Come Here premiered in Berlinale’s Forum in 2021.
Sleep No More is the latest feature from Indonesian filmmaker Edwin, whose Postcards From The Zoo played in Competition in 2012. The fantasy horror is co-produced by Atsuko Ohno at Japan’s Hassaku Labs, lensed by frequent Kiyoshi Kurosawa collaborator Akiko Ashizawa, and features music by Hiroyuki Nagashima. It follows two sisters who work in a factory and whose lives unravel when a dark figure begins to possess the bodies of fellow labourers deprived of rest.
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