More than a dozen offerings in Cantonese and Mandarin at the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF), which ran from Oct. 28 through Nov. 6, showcased established and upcoming talent from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. This year’s lineup has been dubbed a “Chinese hotspot,” offering an early look at buzzworthy new cinema from around the region.
Shozo Ichiyama, TIFF’s programming director, boasts longstanding ties to Chinese-speaking colleagues, having served as a producer on films by acclaimed Sixth Generation director Jia Zhangke (“A Touch of Sin”) as well as Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien (“Flowers of Shanghai”). His industry connections to China, in particular, have transformed TIFF into a robust arena for cultural exchange and camaraderie — in spite of anemic bilateral relations.
Two evocative films that screened in the Competition section were “My Friend An Delie” and “The Unseen Sister,” both about uneasy duos facing the fallout from their younger years. These narratives took audiences to the peripheries of contemporary China, liminal spaces that yield unstable memories and malleable identities.
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