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A rare chance to see a much overlooked example of director Yasujiro Ozu and star Kinuyo Tanaka at their absolute finest. Awaiting her husband’s return from the war, Tokiko (Tanaka) struggles to support herself and their young child Hiroshi, a situation which reaches a crisis point when Hiroshi falls ill and requires life-saving treatment. Left [...]
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The hugely popular Fanomenon Anime Day returns to LIFF this year on Sunday 11th November, also presented on the first day of the Thought Bubble Festival 2012 and in partnership with Scotland Loves Animation. Starting at 12 noon in the superb setting of the Victoria Hall at Leeds Town Hall, the Fanomenon Anime Day will [...]
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The Berserk anime is set in a foreboding, medieval Europeaninspired world, where a hundred year war rages on. Lone mercenary Guts travels the land, cutting down his opponents with unrivalled swordsmanship. His ferocity and strength attracts the attention of Griffith, leader of the mercenary group The Band of the Hawk.
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An orphaned drifter, Guts is appropriately [...] -
Despite things having gone a little awry towards the end of the first film, we return to the fray to find that things are still on the up and up for Griffith and his Band of the Hawks as they prove themselves to be ever more invaluable to Midland and their quest to regain land [...]
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After the release of Japan’s first avant-garde feature film, A Page of Madness (Kurutta ippeiji, 1926), director Teinosuke Kinugasa retreated to safer ground with commercial jidai-geki films before his next attempt at raising the nation’s cinema art. Set in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara pleasure district, Crossways was described by its director as a “chambara without swordfights” and [...]
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Set in the time following the 1958 criminalisation of prostitution in Japan, Girls of Dark charts the attempts of Kuniko (Hisako Hara) to reintegrate herself into legitimate society. In turns comical and harrowing, the film is Tanaka’s most direct engagement as a director with the world of prostitution which she so frequently visited as an [...]
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One of two classic Japanese movies screening in Fanomenon this year, presented in association with Zipangu Festival and featuring rarely screened archive 35mm prints. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) sees the world’s two most monumental monsters go head-to-head, slugging it out in their first ever colour widescreen outing. Produced to celebrate Toho studio’s 30th anniversary, [...]
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Matango, Fungus of Terror is a hallucinogenic horror adapted from the 1907 short story The Voice in the Night by the English author William Hope Hodgson. A yacht full of privileged Tokyo-ites are forced to face their primordial selves after they are washed up on a deserted tropical island festooned with clumps of fungus. Ishiro [...]
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Mikio Naruse once said that ‘From the youngest age, I have thought that the world betrays us’, (Anderson and Richie, 1982: 364). Widely considered to be one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Naruse is particularly celebrated for his sympathetic treatment of women and it was through his portrayals of female suffering that he best enunciated his [...]
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An epic retelling of an ancient folktale, Sansho the Bailiff is the story of a family separated by the injustices of Japanese feudal society. After the governor Masauji is exiled to a distant land for defending the rights of farmers, his wife Tamaki (Tanaka) and their children are kidnapped by bandits, who sell Tamaki into [...]
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