Japanese Film Festival

Overview

We’ve binge-watched the best of the International Film Festival, the Latin Film Festival, and the New Zealand Film Festival. And now the Japanese Film Festival is hitting cinemas. The largest Japanese fim festival outside of the country itself is bringing a range of genres to New Zealand shores. Action, anime, comedy and drama will all dominate the big screen in a thematically diverse and stylistically innovative film festival featuring 20 of the best and latest Japanese-made films.

Kicking the event off is the musical comedy Lady Maiko, a Japanese spin on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and spin-off musical My Fair Lady, by director Suo Masayuki. All-country girl Haruko travels to Kyoto with the intention of becoming a maiko, which refers to the kind of apprenticeship (for want of a better word) that one must complete before becoming a geisha. We follow the young girl as she grows and matures, adapting to the big city life and the dialect, song and dance of the maiko.

With a bunch of flicks to look forward to throughout the festival, another filmic hit wraps the event up - The Life of Oharu. The award-winning drama follows promising cook Oharu as she marries above her social rank thanks to her culinary talents. Her relationship with Yasunobu, an heir in the Funaki family, is based around her making up for her husbands appalling cooking skills. But with the help of her mother-in-law, the two women collaborate to help Yasunobu learn his way around the kitchen.