Tokyo Filmex 2026 selects 10 films for its international competition

MUMBAI: From temple-hopping to elephant country, Tokyo Filmex is bringing stories from across Asia to the big screen, with its latest competition line-up exploring family, identity, politics and the human cost of conflict. The 27th edition of the Japanese film festival will run from 20 to 29 November in Tokyo’s Yurakucho district, with 10 films competing for its top honours.

Among the selected titles are Thailand’s 9 Temples to Heaven and Nepal’s Elephants in the Fog, both countries’ submissions to the Academy Awards. The competition is open to emerging Asian directors whose films were completed in 2025 or 2026, with four of the 10 selections marking first features. The programme brings together filmmakers whose work has travelled through major international festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Rotterdam.

Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, known for appearing in every feature by filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang since Rebels of the Neon God in 1992, will serve on the three-member international jury. The remaining jurors are expected to be announced later. The panel will award a Grand Prize carrying JPY 700,000, approximately $4,500, for the winning director, and a Special Jury Prize worth JPY 300,000, approximately $1,900. Both awards will be presented at the festival’s closing ceremony on 29 November.

Thailand’s 9 Temples to Heaven, directed by Sompot Chidgasornpongse, offers a family road trip with an unusually morbid destination. The filmmaker, who has worked as an assistant director to Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, makes his narrative feature debut with a deadpan comedy about a 63-year-old man who takes nine relatives on a one-day pilgrimage to nine temples after a fortune teller predicts his mother will soon die. There is one complication: the mother refuses to leave the car.

The film premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and went on to win Best Director and Best Actor at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Its blend of family friction, superstition and dark humour gives the competition an unconventional opening note.

Nepal’s Elephants in the Fog, meanwhile, takes a more serious route through questions of identity, marginalisation and justice. Directed by Abinash Bikram Shah, the debut feature centres on Pilati, the head of a kinnar, or third-gender, community living in a village surrounded by elephant forest. When a girl goes missing and the police fail to help, Pilati takes charge of the search.

The film won the Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, becoming the first Nepali film to be selected for the festival’s official programme. Its inclusion at Tokyo Filmex places a story rooted in a specific community within a wider conversation about whose experiences receive attention on screen.

Venice contributes four titles to the competition. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s The Burning Giants, selected for the festival’s Horizons section, follows a young policeman who begins questioning a government operation to seal off a forest and relocate its Indigenous Karen residents. His doubts intensify when an unexplained white smoke begins burning people, turning a political conflict into an unsettling mystery.

Michelle Zhou’s debut Big Little Things, also from Venice’s Horizons section, approaches questions of identity through an intimate family dilemma. Drawing on her own life, Zhou tells the story of a woman who hires a fake boyfriend and takes him home to Harbin for the Lunar New Year holiday to conceal her relationship with her girlfriend from her mother. The film won Venice’s Premio Autrici Under 40, an award recognising young female directors, and has received four Golden Horse nominations.

Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari’s A Bit of Light, which competed in Venice’s main competition, follows a Tehran doctor who loses his medical licence after treating injured protesters and subsequently plans to take his own life. The film brings the consequences of political unrest into a personal story about professional responsibility, repression and despair.

The fourth Venice-linked title, Gu Shi, is the debut feature of Amie Song, produced through the Biennale College Cinema programme with Anocha Suwichakornpong as executive producer. Its political concerns are wrapped in a fairy-tale setting, following a family hiding in an isolated house caught between a forest and the sea.

Two films arrive from Toronto. South Korean director Yoon Dan-bi’s The World Before, which featured in the festival’s Platform competition, follows a 17-year-old girl living on a southern island who is drawn towards a childhood friend after returning home for his grandmother’s funeral. The film received a special mention in the New Directors section at San Sebastian.

Filipino filmmaker John Torres makes his first narrative feature with The Remotes, which also screened at the New York Film Festival. The neo-noir follows a widowed detective nearing retirement who begins connecting a series of fatal road accidents to a voice app designed to retrain reckless drivers. The premise places technology at the centre of a crime story, raising questions about responsibility and the consequences of attempts to modify human behaviour.

Singaporean director Priscilla Ang’s debut Ah Girl rounds out the selection alongside Japan’s A Song From Beyond. Set in 1994 and framed in a 4:3 aspect ratio, Ah Girl won the Youth Jury Award in Rotterdam’s Bright Future section and has received three Golden Horse nominations.

A Song From Beyond is the fifth feature by Japanese filmmaker Sugita Kyoshi, whose Haruhara-san’s Recorder won the Grand Prix at FIDMarseille. The story follows a photographer who agrees to appear in a student’s graduation film, only to discover that her estranged father has also been cast as the father in the project. The premise sets up an encounter between performance and unresolved family relationships.

Beyond the 10-film competition, Tokyo Filmex has announced a wider programme spanning special screenings, documentaries, shorts and Japanese cinema. Novelist Maha Harada’s directorial debut, In My Father’s Room, will open the festival. Adapted by Harada from one of her own short stories, it stars Yu Aoi as a museum guard who receives an unfamiliar key from her estranged father, played by Issey Ogata, a month after his death.

The film premiered in competition at San Sebastian, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Ateneo Guipuzcoano Award. Its selection as the opening film gives the festival a story centred on family secrets, grief and the objects that can connect people to the past.

Anthony Chen’s We Are All Strangers will close the event. The film completes the Singaporean director’s ‘Growing Up’ trilogy, following Ilo Ilo and Wet Season. It centres on a hawker-stall owner and his 21-year-old son, both of whom marry and end up sharing a small public housing flat. The film became the first Singaporean title selected for the Berlinale’s main competition and is also Singapore’s Oscar submission.

Both the opening and closing films are part of the 12-title Special Screenings section. The programme also includes Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s 34th feature, the black-and-white The Day She Returns, which comes from Berlin’s Panorama, and Kogonada’s Hong Kong-set Zi, dedicated to the late composer Sakamoto Ryuichi and selected from Sundance’s NEXT section.

Hong Kong cinema will receive a historical spotlight through a restored version of Ann Hui’s 1981 thriller The Story of Woo Viet. Starring a 25-year-old Chow Yun-fat, the film will screen in the M+ 4K restoration that premiered in Venice Classics, bringing an important work from the Hong Kong New Wave back to the big screen.

Documentaries will broaden the programme’s geographical and political reach. Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor follows three US volunteer physicians who treated wounded people in Gaza before lobbying the media and Congress. After premiering in Sundance’s US Documentary Competition, it won the Audience Award at Hot Docs.

Japanese filmmaker Irie Yu will make his feature documentary debut with The Day He Retires, which will have its world premiere at Tokyo Filmex. The film follows Takeishi Kenji, who left his job at the age of 50 to open Fukaya Cinema in Saitama. Now 76, he is preparing to hand the theatre over to a new generation, offering a portrait of cinema exhibition, community and the challenge of keeping local cultural spaces alive.

Lee Kang-sheng will also appear on screen through a double bill of Tsai Ming-liang’s two latest Walker films. The long-running series, which began in 2012, follows Lee as a contemporary version of the Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang, moving through cities around the world at an extraordinarily slow pace.

The 11th chapter, Dust, was filmed in San Sebastian and premiered in Venice. The 12th instalment, Night Journey, is set in the Czech town of Jihlava and has been nominated for Best Documentary Short at the Golden Horse Awards.

Short films will feature work from established and emerging filmmakers. Jia Zhangke’s Torino Shadow, commissioned by Turin’s National Cinema Museum and first shown as a Cannes special screening, will headline the programme. It will be joined by Carlo Francisco Manatad’s And If Thuy Didn’t Exist, which received a special mention in Locarno’s shorts competition, and The Bovine Comedy by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, director of A Useful Ghost. The short won Locarno’s Pardino d’Oro for Best Auteur Short.

The Made in Japan sidebar will feature three films. Yamanishi Tatsuya’s Goodbye, Absence and Sasaki Omoi’s 22nd Century Cat are both scheduled to have their world premieres in Tokyo. Xavier Tera’s debut The Color of the Sun, set in Okinawa in 2012 and shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, arrives after winning the FIPRESCI Prize in Venice’s Horizons section.

Screenings will take place at Yurakucho Asahi Hall, Marunouchi Piccadilly and Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho. Talents Tokyo 2026, organised in cooperation with Berlinale Talents, will run alongside the festival at Vision Center Yurakucho and Yurakucho Asahi Square, connecting the event with emerging filmmakers and industry professionals.

With 25 films announced so far across three sections, Tokyo Filmex 2026 is assembling a programme that moves between intimate family dramas, political allegories, social realities and experiments in cinematic form. From a reluctant temple pilgrimage to a search for a missing girl, the competition’s stories underline the range of contemporary Asian filmmaking, while the festival’s wider selection places new voices alongside established auteurs and restored classics.

The 27th edition runs from 20 to 29 November in Tokyo’s Yurakucho district, with the competition’s top prizes to be announced on 29 November.