Running parallel to the stellar film program of this year's New York Film Festival is a finely curated retrospective series of films from Japanese director Masahiro Shinoda. This prominent director of the Japanese New Wave was fascinated by traditional Japanese aesthetics and the modernity of cinema (and of the transformed Japan of the 1960s, when he started his film career, through to the present). Shinoda's movies detail the spiritual emptiness of post-war Japanese life and search f...

39th International Film Festival Rotterdam 27 January - 7 February, 2010  As part of its main Signals section, the International Film Festival Rotterdam honors Japanese filmmaker Sai Yoichi with a tribute program that includes many of his works including his latest, brilliant ninja action movie Kamui. Furthermore, Signals presents the thematic program ‘After Victory' with recent war films as well as seven works by legendary master of the postwar Japanese cinema Yoshida Kiju.   T...

 The past few years has seen a steady revival of interest in classic Japanese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, with a stream of retrospectives and the issues of DVD packages devoted to the works of such films masters as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenzi Mizoguchi and Shohei Imamura. The latest Japanese director to get the revival treatment is Nagisa Oshima, widely considered a major force in world cinema for his provocative films of the 1960s and 1970s. A national tour of Oshima’s work has opened at the Bro...

One of the things that is most satisfying about the New York Film Festival is its loyalty to certain filmmakers and its interest ien rediscovering the films of cinema masters. This year, the Festival will screen a Max Ophuls romantic melodrama classic (Lola Montes, 1955), an Albert Lewin cult film (Pandora And The Flying Dutchman, 1951) and a Pakistani realist drama (The Day Shall Dawn, 1959). But its major retrospective program sidebar is devoted to the Japanese director Nagisa Oshima. The Fe...