Film Committee Blog

FCCJ film night audiences are no stranger to movie stars, but they are sometimes surprised when the lights go up after the screening, and the Japanese camera crews start filing in for the Q&A sessions. On May 13th, there were 6 TV crews and several dozen still photographers from the Japanese press — all there for sound bites and great images of megastar Satoshi Tsumabuki (Waterboys, The Little House) and Sosuke Ikematsu (The Last Samurai, Love’s Whirlpool). The instant and widespread Japanese coverage of our events enables us to continue sneak previewing some of the most buzzworthy films opening soon in a theater near you.

On this night, that film was Yuya Ishii's Our Family, soon to open across Japan. In 2013, Ishii’s The Great Passage was selected as Japan’s official Oscar entry and swept up every conceivable domestic award, including the top four Japan Academy Prizes. The director could have had his pick of any follow-up project, but as he explained to the FCCJ audience, he chose to adapt the bestselling novel Our Family because he was consciously making a break from the existential comedies with which he had made his reputation. Why? Because it was to be the last film he made before turning 30.

“In 1981, arriving in South Africa felt like visiting another planet, like an American movie from the 1950s,” says Jean-Yves Ollivier in his no-holds-barred narration for Plot for Peace. “I wondered how the whites did not realize that, unless they changed and accepted to share the country, they were headed for disaster.”

Plot For Peace, which has been quietly picking up awards on the international festival circuit and is opening in Japan before it opens in the US, is history retold as political thriller, a riveting documentary that reveals the untold story of apartheid’s fall, focusing on the “mysterious Frenchman” Ollivier, alias “Monsieur Jacques,” an Algiers-born businessman who secretly set the dominoes in motion, using his personal relationships with heads of state to facilitate the mediation and peace processes that ultimately led to the birth of a new South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s release from jail.

Most of the attendees at FCCJ’s sneak preview screening had never heard of Ollivier, and didn’t remember many of the events replayed in the film’s horrific newsreel footage. Nor did they recall all the former statesmen, generals, diplomats, master spies and anti-apartheid fighters who appear in the film — except perhaps Winnie Mandela — talking us carefully through the maze of African politics of the time, clarifying events and roles in their frontline efforts to help end apartheid.

It's no secret that FCCJ's Exhibition Committee Chair Bruce Osborn is a famed photographer. Now he is also the star of a film about his "life's work," the joyous portraits of Japanese families that he has been taking for the past 32 years. The MC premiered Oyako: Present to the Future on April 2 to an overstuffed house  close to 200 people. During the Q&A session, Osborn,  producer Yoshiko Inoue and director Toshi Inomata, discussed the project's beginnings, and their decision to pitch it on Motion Gallery, a crowdfunding site that eventually brought in 1/3 of their budget.

Osborn was once just a commercial photographer from Los Angeles; now he is the leader, with his wife Inoue, of a social movement in Japan. Arriving here in 1980, he was inspired to shoot a series of portraits of punk-rock musicians with their parents. Fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of the Japanese "oyako" (parent-child) relationship -- especially when he became a father himself -- he realized that the photos had given him entrée to observe Japanese culture at its most intimate. The revealing and sometimes humorous black-and-white portraits he took brought an overwhelming response from Japanese families -- and thus a movement was born.

Joshua Oppenheimer's mega-award-winning documentary The Act of Killing, which focuses on the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66, was 8 years in the making, but took only one year to scoop up over 50 major awards, attract more coverage than just about any other documentary in history, and to completely rewrite the rules of nonfiction filmmaking. Exploring what one critic calls "the psychological gestalt of a country in which mass-murderers brag about their slaughtering -- and still intimidate their neighbors -- with complete impunity," Oppenheimer and his crew (most of whom remain anonymous, for fear of reprisal) encouraged two of the executioners, boastful that they've killed hundreds of "Communists," to reenact their atrocities -- as both perpetrators and victims -- in styles inspired by the classic Hollywood gangster movies they had idolized in their youths.

To audiences accustomed to seeing stories of genocide retold by the survivors and the families of victims, The Act of Killing is particularly disturbing. But Oppenheimer's masterpiece allows us to see the other side, to get beneath the skins of these villains, to probe for something deeper, to capture their conscience, to elicit a moral response. There is no question that he has achieved those aims -- and then some.

Lee Daniels' award-winning film uses the real-life story of a White House butler to trace the dramatic civil rights struggles that ultimately made it possible for an African American to rise to the highest position in America, with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The Butler follows Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) as he serves during seven presidential administrations between 1957 and 1986. At the White House, he becomes an eyewitness to history and the inner workings of the Oval Office as the civil rights movement unfolds. He is the perfect butler, but his commitment to his First Family fosters tensions at home, alienating his loving wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and creating conflict with his son, who joins the Freedom Riders movement and endangers his father's position.

With an extraordinary lead performance by Oscar winner Whitaker and a star-laden ensemble cast, this epic drama guides us through political upheavals and the growth of a nation - but ultimately, it is a story about the resilience of one man, and the power of family.

Marking a groundbreaking collaboration between Japan and Indonesia, the highly anticipated Killers arrived at FCCJ just days after its world premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and less than a week before its Japan debut on February 1. The pan-Asian thriller was coproduced by Nikkatsu Corp. and Indonesian production house Guerilla Merah Films. Shot in Tokyo and Jakarta, the film’s creative team includes some of the hottest names in the business: producer Yoshinori Chiba of Cold Fish fame and executive producer Gareth Evans of The Raid: Redemption.

One-half of the acclaimed directing duo the Mo Brothers, Timo Tjahjanto heaped praise on Nikkatsu’s support of the venture, which spent only 15 days shooting in Tokyo before moving to Jakarta for 40 more.

Although some people were scared off by the MC’s description of Killers and the truly frightening Japanese poster, they were missing the bigger picture: this film is one of the first major international coproductions with a Japan studio — a trend that will surely continue. Films in this violent, psychological thriller genre (sometimes derisively called “torture porn”) are an outgrowth of the J-Horror films that became so popular worldwide in the 90s, another big story. These genre films also tend to be cheaply made, but they also tend to be among the most profitable films at the global box office.

The captivating Au Revoir L’ete, the award-winning new film from director Koji Fukada, kicked off our 2014 Film Night screenings. Three years after his blackly humorous Hospitalité scooped up awards and wowed international audiences, Fukada’s charming homage to Eric Rohmer has been following suit on the festival circuit. Fukada was joined by next-generation film royalty producer-actor Kiki Sugino and star Fumi Nikaido for the Q&A, during which Nikaido revealed that she had been shooting Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell?— in which she plays a bitch on wheels — at the same time as Fukada’s film. In Au Revoir L’ete, Nikaido (of Himizu fame) plays the beguiling 18-year-old Sakuko, who accompanies her aunt to the countryside for a few weeks in the waning days of summer, meets a variety of local characters, befriends a Fukushima refugee who works part-time at his uncle’s love hotel, and observes the increasingly complicated love lives of her aunt and other adults with growing interest. Leisurely paced and gently comical — but packing an emotional punch or two — Au Revoir L’ete brought a ray of summer warmth to a frigid January day at FCCJ.
— Photos by Koichi Mori except where noted.