Tokyo Opens With a Song and Closes With a Siege

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Cinepuuulse is a magazine, a radar and a diary about Asian cinema — Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand — read from Tokyo.

Our mark is 銀幕, ginmaku, the old word for the silver screen; it is the same two characters in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. A magazine, because every week one film is worth reading about slowly. A radar, because we count what the region's screens are talking about — box office, festivals, directors, anime, streaming — and show it as it moves. A diary, because a seal is set each day in that day's colour, and the days add up.

We read the local press in its own languages and bring it over in English: the Japanese film sites, the Korean trade papers, the Chinese culture desks, the Vietnamese and Thai entertainment pages. Everything here links back to the people who made it; the images belong to their authors.

Cinepuuulse will keep changing. New sources, new signals, new ways of looking — a little better each week, never finished. If a film here made you want to buy a ticket, that is enough.

Thank you for reading. ありがとうございます。

Tokyo Opens With a Song and Closes With a Siege

The first thing the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival will ask of its audience is to sing along. Sukiyaki, the opening film, is Zeze Takahisa's musical about the making of a 1963 record: a composer, Nakamura Hachidai; a lyricist, Ei Rokusuke; a singer, Sakamoto Kyu; and a song that walked out of a Tokyo studio and into the American charts without a word of English. It is a strange, generous choice for an opening night, and a telling one. Tokyo is not opening with a coronation. It is opening with the story of a small thing that travelled.

The festival runs from 26 October to 4 November in the streets between Yurakucho, Marunouchi and Ginza, a walkable city of screens where the distance between a press screening and a coffee is one crossing. It is the last of the year's big A-list festivals, the one that arrives after Venice has spoken and Busan has shouted, and its pleasure is exactly that lateness: the argument is already in the air, and Tokyo gets to answer it in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and everything in between.

The bookends say what kind of answer it wants to give. The closing film is Colony, Yeon Sang-ho's Korean thriller about a bioterror attack that seals people inside a Seoul skyscraper with the infected, who begin to think as one. Between the song and the siege sits the centerpiece, Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to the film that won Japan a visual-effects Oscar, set two years after a country's devastation, when a new force arrives before the recovery is finished. Read the three titles together and you have a season in miniature: memory, spectacle, fear, and a city looking at itself from three angles.

The programme proper is still sealed. What is announced is the shape: an International Competition for the Tokyo Grand Prix, Asian Future for directors with three features or fewer, and a Classics strand at the National Film Archive devoted to Kenji Mizoguchi from 27 October to 1 November, which alone would justify the journey. Last year the festival received 1,970 submissions from 108 countries and regions; the selection from this year's pile is expected in the weeks ahead, and the Asian titles in it are what this magazine will be waiting for.

I will cover the festival from the screening rooms: a letter a day while it runs, a longer piece on the Asian films that deserve a wider audience, and a closing note on what the edition added up to. We cover festivals as cities rather than red carpets, and Tokyo, more than most, is one. If you are in the city that week, the best seat is still the one near the front, on the aisle, where you can hear the room decide.