HONOURING JAPAN AT THE 41ST FESTIVAL DU NOUVEAU CINÉMA   Pop trade and culture of the avant-garde. This year, the Festival du nouveau cinéma is honouring Japan. Operation seduction, post Fukushima and other disasters, far from the media stereotypes of a culture and a country that have always fascinated the West. It is the ideal opportunity for public and journalists alike to reflect on a film industry that is among the most important, dynamic and influential in the worl...

 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...

Sunday, August 31-------The Montreal World Film Festival is saluting the fine work done by the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, a Japanese organization that promotes both classic and contemporary Japanese films, by showcasing three classic Japanese films here. The Film Institute was founded by Madame Kashiko Kawakita to promote Japanese cinema abroad. The Institute's mission in the past 35 years has been to collect and protect films and other items of film heritage and to make them available to...

Melbourne International Film Festival will open on July 25th with much lauded and always debated Michael Moore's latest offering Sicko, which had its world premiere at last month's Cannes Film Festival. "Sicko proves the power of documentary to place important issues on the social and political agenda - I can't say I've always agreed with him, particularly the ethics of that scene with Charlton Heston, but this is Mike Moore in vintage form. Sicko is brilliant in its execution, full of humour an...

Punto de Vista will show the Best Japanese documentary films of the last sixty yearsUnder the title The Cinema of a Thousand Years, this season unites a selection of Japanese non-fiction masterpieces in an attempt at reconstructing the country's little-known filmography by screening some of its fundamental components from 1939 to 2004. It is set to be the first retrospective of this subject at a Spanish film festival.The season mainly focuses on films produced since the World War, but does also ...