Shinsedai Cinema Festival 2010

As the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts both start winding down, New Yorkers (and everyone else for that matter) need only look slightly northward for more Asian film enjoyment.  The Shinsedai Cinema Festival, located in Toronto, is a four-day event (from July 22nd to July 25th) that concentrates on independent films and up-and-coming filmmakers from Japan.

In its second year, the festival kicks off with young director Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life, still riding a buzz from last year’s New York Asian Film Festival and Raindance Film Festival showings and also recently released in the UK on Third Window Films.  Other highlights of the film line-up include a rare showing of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1933 silent film The Water Magician with musical accompaniment by Toronto-based experimental quartet Vowls, award-winning documentary Live Tape, a return appearance by artist and animator Akino Kondoh, an animated short entitled Ladybird’s Requiem, and Gen Takahashi’s Confessions of a Dog, praised by midnighteye.com’s Jasper Sharp, also co-programmer and co-director of the festival,  as “an amazing film…that has you on the edge of your seat the whole way through.”

In addition to the films, Chris Magee, the festival’s other co-programmer and co-director and founder and editor of the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow blog, has mentioned that several of the filmmakers themselves will be attending.  This list includes the aforementioned directors Momoko Ando, Akino Kondoh, and Gen Takahashi as well as Yasunobu Takahashi who will also be showing his film Locked Out and Tokachi Tsuchiya who is showing his documentary A Normal Life, Please!

For more information about the Festival, ticket sales, and news, go to http://shinsedai-fest.com/

To hear an interview I conducted with festival co-programmer and co-director Chris Magee on VCinema, go here.

To hear an interview I conducted with festival co-programmer and co-director Jasper Sharp on VCinema, go here.

Another Hole in the Head 2010

As East Coast film festival coverage heats up here on cineAWESOME!, we here in the west refuse to be outdone and SF Indiefest will see to that with Another Hole in the Head (HoleHead), its seventh annual film and music festival.  HoleHead is three weeks long, this year running from July 8th to the 23rd.  The film portion of the festival focuses solely on underground, indie, and genre film from around the world.    This year’s diverse offerings include the reviled film of the year A Serbian Film, grindhouse faves The Exterminator and Lady Terminator, genre film docs Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film and American Grindhouse, a rare showing of Metropolis 1984 Redux, and other films from Iceland, Italy, and Singapore as well as the Bay Area itself.  Owing to the surge in popularity of tokusatsu-flavored horror and gore films, HoleHead is particularly Japan-heavy this year with the latest from directors Noboru Iguchi with Mutant Girls Squad, Takashi Miike with Yatterman, and Tomo Haraguchi with Death Kappa.  Also of note is Sexy Time Trip Ninjas, an ’80s-era pinku film recently acquired by the boutique distributor Pink Eiga and directed by 2008 Academy Award winner Yojiro Takita.

Much like the film line-up, a diverse range of musical artists, from punk veterans The Dwarves to alt-country muse Cory Branan, make up the musical portion of the festival.

Look forward to festival coverage and film reviews here and our sister site, VCinema.  Another Hole in the Head may not have the high-profile glitz of the festivals on the other coast, but it looks to have the same amount of fun.

For more information on Another Hole in the Head or tickets visit www.sfindie.com or call 1-415-820-3907.