Eigasai to highlight movie adaptations in 2016 edition

In celebration of July as Philippines-Japan Friendship Month—a friendship that marks its 60th anniversary this year—The Japan Foundation Manila and Shangri-La Plaza team up again to hold Eigasai 2016, the newest edition of the annual Japanese film festival that will run at the Shang Cineplex from July 8 to 17.

Over half of the 10 diverse films—first released between 2011 and 2015— to be screened at Eigasai are lauded adaptations of novels or non-fiction books. Two of these are helmed by director Masato Harada, who, a Shangri-La Plaza statement says, will visit Manila to introduce Kakekomi and deliver a talk at the Shang Cineplex on July 9.

Based on acclaimed author Yasushi Inoue’s novel Tokeiji Hanadayori and set in a “divorce temple” in Kamakura in 1841, Kakekomi focuses on a doctor-dramatist who helps divorce-seeking women, and his involvement in the problems of a foundry worker and a courtesan.

Harada’s other film is an adaptation of another Inoue novel, the autobiographical Chronicle of My Mother, which explores the author’s feelings of abandonment after he was separated from his parents when he was young.

Other screen adaptations in the lineup are Yuya Ishii’s The Great Passage, Japan’s official entry to the 2014 Academy Awards that’s based on Shion Miura’s novel of the same title, about an editor and his 15- year struggle to edit a huge dictionary with 240,000 entries; Yoji Yamada’s 2014 Berlin Film Festival award-winner The Little House, from Kyoko Nakajima’s prize-winning Showa Modern (1926–1945)-set novel about an illicit affair between the wife of a rich toymaker and one of her husband’s colleagues, as seen through the eyes of the former’s housemaid; Daihachi Yoshida’s Pale Moon, the movie version of Mitsuyo Kakuta’s novel Kami no Tsuki that chronicles a contractual bank employee’s fall into ruin when she becomes involved with a university student and starts embezzling funds; and Nobuhiro Doi’s Flying Colors, from schoolteacher Nobutaka Tsubota’s bestselling non-fiction book, about an indifferent and underachieving student who, with Tsubota’s help, tries to pass Keio University’s difficult entrance examinations.

Also part of this year’s Eigasai is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, which tells the story of three sisters who meet their now-orphaned teenage half-sister after their estranged father dies and how their lives are transformed when she moves in with them.

Filipinos should find Junichi Suzuki’s Crossroads interesting, for it’s about an assistant cameraman-turned-troublesome Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers trainee who, with two others, travels to Baguio City in Benguet province, where he meets a local boy and his older sister (played by Alodia Gosiengfiao), whose struggles he learns to appreciate.

Animé lovers are in for a treat with Mamoru Hosoda’s award-winning full-length animated feature The Boy and the Beast, which centers on a young boy who becomes a beast’s apprentice, and how the bond created by their living and training together evolved into a more paternal one.

Rounding up the lineup is Ryutaro Nakagawa’s August in Tokyo, which portrays the dynamics of people trying to co-exist in the city and in nature by following a small-time member of the Yakuza and a part-time worker.

Screenings are free and on a first-come, first-serve basis. After its run at the Shang Cineplex, Eiga Sai 2016 will move to the Abreeza Mall Cinema in Davao City from July 22 to 24; the Film Development Council of the Philippines’s Cinematheque Davao from July 26 to 30; SM Baguio Cinema in Baguio City from August 11 to 14 and Cinematheque Baguio on August 15; Ayala Center Cebu Cinema in Cebu City from August 17 to 21; and the University of the Philippines Film Institute from August 17 to 20. ALVIN I. DACANAY 

For more details, visit www.facebook.com/JFmanila or www.facebook.com/shangrilaplazaofficialfanpage.