Tokyo FILMeX enters its seventh year as the smaller, friendlier, artier alternative to the Tokyo International Film Festival.
The fact that FILMeX keeps going strong despite following hot on the heels of TIFF in October is testament to how it's carved out a clear identity for itself. As always, this year's FILMeX features a sharply focused selection of Asian auteur cinema, ranging from Iran to Taiwan, Tajikistan to Hong Kong. And many readers of this page will be pleased to learn that nearly all of the films on offer will be screened with English as well as Japanese subtitles.
Of particular interest is Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke's "Still Life," which was a last-minute entry to this year's Venice film festival where it won the Golden Lion award for Best Film. Jia is one of the most astute chroniclers of contemporary China. In films like "Platform" and "Unknown Pleasures," he has created stark portraits of the human cost of China's modernization, with an accent on the rootlessness and dislocation that has resulted. Both, unsurprisingly, were banned in China. "Still Life" probably will be too, given that it's set in and around the environmentally controversial Three Gorges Dam, and it portrays the towns wiped out by the dam's construction, their people displaced to uncertain futures. The lyrical and elegiac story, mostly neorealist but laced with touches of fantasy, follows two people returning to a nearly submerged town to look for lost lovers. The opening film at FILMeX on Nov. 17, this may be the hardest ticket to get.