Mumbai fest to include Japanese film festival

MUMBAI: To pay tribute to eight decades of Japanese cinema with a special section in its eight-day programme, the 12th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) has collaborated with the Japanese consulate in Mumbai and The Japan Foundation to organize a film festival that will show 44 films, both classic and contemporary.

The films cover eight decades of Japanese cinema from the early 1930s till date with a variety of genres and styles like traditional family drama, samurai epic and yakuza thriller amongst others.

Some of the other films to be screened at the fest are Akira Kurosawa‘s No Regrets For Our Youth and Ran, Masaki Kobayashi‘s three-part magnum opus The Human Condition, Mikio Naruse‘s When A Woman Ascends The Stairs and also works of acknowledged masters like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi apart from recent films by Shuji Terayama and Takashi Miike.

The section will be inaugurated with the all-India premiere of veteran director Yoji Yamada‘s melodrama, About Her Brother (2010). Popular Japanese contemporary director Takashi Koizumi and several international film historians and scholars are expected to attend the festival.