Ginmaku Japanese Film Festival 2025

Figures of Otherness – New Japanese Normal?

When I discovered the Ginmaku Japanese Film Festival in 2018, I remembered that I selected Akio Fujimoto’s Passage of Life to discuss on Filmexplorer for its thematising of a “non-Japanese Otherness”. To my eyes, the film «breaks the “traditional” absence of the theme of the “foreigner” in Japanese cinema (with the exception of Takashi Miike’s cinema of the gaijin), as it focuses on a Burmese family waiting for a refugee permit. Since at least Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), the figure of the outsider has been richly developed in the Japanese cinematic self-representation, but rarely goes beyond the limit of this self-representation itself.»

Now, among the fourteen films and the Sonomi Sato’s shorts that are programmed this year at the Ginmaku festival, three films focus on Japanese “internal” Otherness: geographically, with the choice of the “exotic” Okinawa for Toshiyuki Teruya’s Kanasando, and socially, with Genki Kikkawa’s documentary about a homosexual of the elderly generation (The 94-Year-Old Gay) and Bunji Sotoyama’s feature on a senior sex club (Tea Friends). However, starting with the projection of Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956), the curator and director of the festival – Mizuki Mazbara – seems to have proposed a clear “foreign” thread with five more titles: Emma Kawawada’s My Small Land, with a Kurdish migrant teenager as protagonist; Kohei Kawabata’s Dearest Viet, a documentary on the life of the Vietnamese Duc Nguyen, victim and testimony of the cruelties of the Vietnam War; Janus Victoria’s Diamonds in the Sand, the story of an old Japanese person in the Philippines; and two films by Takeshi Fukunaga on the Ainu people, the documentary Ainu Puri and the opening feature film of the festival Ainu Mosi. The Ainu people actually live between the north of Japan and Russia, thus constituting an even sharper criticism of any nationalist separation between an inside and an outside. With the aforementioned films, it will probably not only raise the question of thematising the “foreigner”, but also of integrating it in non-nationalist cohabitation of people.

How much is this particularly interesting thread the proposal of Mizuki Mazbara, or the consequence of a trend in Japanese cinema? The discovery of the films and the festivals’ Q&A sessions with the director will probably give an answer; a similar question between curatorial choice, and societal and film trends can be raised regarding two more threads that seem to emerge in the programme: of fifteen screenings, six are documentaries – an component of an answer: Japan actually boasts a tradition, as important as it is neglected, of documentary films – and six concern very old people – another component of an answer: by 2050, one-third of the population in Japan is expected to be 65 and older.

Ginmaku Japanese Film Festival | Zürich | 28/5-1/6/2025
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