Japanese Film Festival

Overview

The 15th Japanese Film Festival kicks off with a ghost story, but this is no Ringu or The Grudge. A Ghost of a Chance is the comedic masterpiece from “King of Comedy” Koki Mitani, taking place in a courtroom where defence lawyer Emi must argue the case of a man whose only alibi is a 421 year-old ghost.

From there the festival leaps into 28 Australian premieres and 2 Sydney premieres of the most hilarious, thrilling, insightful, delicious and action-packed films to come out of Japan in recent years. Yoshihiro Nakamura’s A Boy and His Samurai gives a tongue-in-cheek insight to the blurring of traditional and modern Japanese culture, and the creators of Ponyo and Spirited Away return with an equally captivating animation inspired by the children’s novel series The Borrowers. Cinema meets gaming in GANTZ, which challenges the semi-deceased to hunt down aliens in order to win a choice to either be freed from GANTZ or to revive someone already dead, while death itself is explored through the moving closing feature Life Back Then.

Audiences will also find plenty of special events, from spoken prologues by award-winning director Hideyuki Hirayama and superstar actor Yutaka Takenouchi, to a raucous live-action adaption comedy in the vein of Harry Potter — only better, because it’s with ninjas.