As always, with all its side events, Camera Japan puts the word fest in festival. But the heart of it all is of course the films. And with the festival officially ended, we can look at which films were liked best by the audiences, now that the scores are in.
I always like seeing these lists. Were these the best films? Who knows, critics and audiences sure disagree often, and it's hard finding an objective scale to measure them against each other. Some will say that films which confront (or even piss off) the audiences are the better films, and divisive titles will not be on this list.
Also, it's easy to bend the numbers a bit with some spectacle, like visiting stars, a director's speech, a funny Q&A afterwards... But in general, if you get good scores from a paying audience, it means you've created a crowdpleaser. And that's worth something too!
With that in mind, let's go to the list! So what DID Rotterdam and Amsterdam audiences vote to the top?
Here is a gallery of the top-5 in reverse order. Click on the edge of the pictures to scroll through them.
5: Mondays: See You 'This' Week
Each year at the festival there seems to be a quirky low-budget comedy which becomes an audience favorite, and this year, Mondays is it.
Takebayashi Ryo's comedy shows a bunch of young, tired office workers discovering that by putting in huge mounts of overtime, they manage to '"reset" the week back to Monday, starting over again. After their initial dismay they try to game the system and break free... The satire about monotonous work stings enough to tickle and audiences liked this very much.
4: Tsugaru Lacquer Girl
There was a surprisingly big group of films this year about people inheriting a shop, or workplace, and doing their best to keep it working. In Tsuruoka Keiko's film we see a young girl trying to persuade her father to teach her the ancient craft of painstakingly lacquering Japanese pottery, something he is loath to do as the necessary stubborn attention to detail basically brought ruin to his family. Will she succeed? Of course, in a way, and director Tsuruoka has an eye for pretty pictures.
3: Yudō
Two brothers inherit their family's traditional bathhouse, and are immediately at odds about what to do with it: keep or sell? Slapstick and hijinks ensue in this comedy by Suzuki Masayuki. Brimming with cameos by famous people visiting the bathhouse, and starring Ikuta Tōma (of The Mole Song trilogy fame) as the brother who wants to bulldoze the place to build new apartments.
2: Perfect Days
Wim Wenders' latest film is a veritable festival darling, ending up in audience lists everywhere. Yakusho Kōji stars (literally shines, almost) as a lonely but happy man in Tokyo, whose life gets a bit rattled when family members start showing up.
1: A Mother's Touch
The amazing true story of Fukushima Satoshi, who became a university professor despite being blind AND deaf. A super-intelligent boy, Satoshi only has sight in one eye but loses that at age nine. Despair sets in when he also starts losing his hearing at age 18. But then his mother devises a way for him to communicate, using pressure points on his fingers and hands to convey text to him, and this allows him to thrive.
I skipped this because I knew the story and was afraid this would be an overly sentimental film, but apparently my misgivings were unjustified and I missed the most popular film of the festival. Drat...