Film festivals don't take place in isolation: An interesting city makes for a more interesting festival, unless you are the sort of movie nerd who sees six films a day and lives on convenience store sandwiches.
This is especially true of the Kyoto International Film and Art Festival, whose fourth edition took place from Oct. 12 to 15 at venues around the city. It's not only that Kyoto itself was long a center of the Japanese film industry and is still a trove of art, both ancient and modern: With the backing of Yoshimoto Kogyo, a major talent agency with deep roots in the Kansai region, KIFF stages only-in-Kyoto experiences that set it apart from the festival run.
Plenty of festivals, for example, screen silent films, but this year KIFF presented a program of Japanese and Hollywood silents with benshi (film narrator) and keyboard accompaniment in a century-old theater, the Oe Noh Gakudo. Watching a teenaged Setsuko Hara in the 1935 baseball melodrama "Tama o Nagero" (translation: "Throw the Ball") and Matsunosuke Onoe, Japan's first movie star, in the recently discovered 1925 tokusatsu (special effects) film "Jiraiya," while sitting on tatami in the noh theater I had both a rare movie and a time travel experience (and my legs, a numbness experience).
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.