27th PIA Film Festival (PFF)

The timetable for the 27th PIA Film Festival (PFF) is now online in Japanese here on the festival's website; the list of "invited works" (shôtai sakuhin) is in Japanese there on the site. (The latter includes stills from each work, so even if you don't read Japanese, it may be of interest to you.) The promo trailer (yokokuhen) for the festival is here; it was directed by Tomoyuki Furumaya, and stars hanae* (the asterisk is part of her name). There's a list here in English of the fifteen movies nominated for this year's PFF Award, and one there in English of the PFF Scholarship films.

The invited works at PFF this year are as follows: Kihachirô Kawamoto's doll animation movie Shisha no sho (the official website for which is here); Jacques Richard's documentary Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois; Anne Andreu's documentary François Truffaut, une autobiographie; Nobutaka 'Nobu' Yamaoka's Tennen sei shinryaku to mozô ai; Mitsuru Meike's The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (Hanai Sachiko no karei na shôgai) (which was screened at Nippon Connection in Frankfurt am Main, Germany on April 15th); Kenji Uchida's 2001 feature Weekend Blues; Sôgo Ishii's 1976 short Panic High School (Kôkô dai-panikku) (listed running time: 23 minutes); Ishii's 1978 feature Totsugeki! Hakata gurentai (listed running time: 75 minutes); C. Jay Shih, Alan Tuan, and Poliang Lin's animated short A Fish with a Smile; Charlotte Lagarde and Lisa Denker's documentary The Heart of the Sea; Tadanobu Asano's Tori (which Yamaoka was one of the producers of; there are official webpages for the Japanese DVD release of it here and there); Yamaoka's documentary Sorano (on the making of Asano's Tori); and Yûsuke Kinoshita's Mizu no hana (the fifteenth - i.e., latest - PFF Scholarship film). The festival runs from July 9-15 in Tokyo.