There was something for everyone at Waterford's Japanese Film Festival

This week, Waterford Film For All and Garter Lane hosted the Japanese International Film Festival. 

JIFF happened throughout April across many towns and cities in Ireland, including Dundalk, Limerick and Ballina. Each venue played a selection of the seventeen films on the programme.

It would have been nice if every venue had the capacity to screen every film; there were a lot of films on the programme I would have loved to have seen, but I do think we got lucky with our programme. Each film was completely different to the last. There was something for everyone. A slow-burning drama, a social commentary horror and a nostalgic 80s anime.

'Kokuho' by Sang-il Lee, the highest-grossing live-action Japanese film of all time, was screened on night one. Trigger warning – this film is three hours long, and boy, you can feel every minute pass as you’re watching. If you like drawn-out, psychological dramas, then this is great, but even I have to say, an intermission would have been a godsend.

The story follows Kikuo, an ambitious young man with a troubled past. Orphaned as a teenager, he travels to Osaka to study under a famous kabuki actor (a male actor who plays a female role in traditional Japanese theatre). He befriends the actor's only son, and an intense rivalry is formed.

The movie charts Kikuo’s life right up until he’s an old man. We see him treat women badly, be bullied because of his family circumstances, grieve his mentor and doubt his abilities.

The scenes of the actual Kabuki dances are exquisite and it’s a side of Japanese culture I knew nothing about. Helpfully, the English subtitles added some context to the film without hand-holding the audience.

The festival finale was the freshly remastered 'Akira', directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Before going in, I availed of a bottle of Asahi for only €2 and mingled with the other film buffs. Garter Lane were incredible hosts, and the theatre was filled with people. 

Although the plot was incredibly convoluted, the film made up for it with how great it looked. The animation was astounding, paired with a psychedelic folk-punk soundtrack, not knowing what’s happening, the film doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it.

The film, which was released in 1988, takes place in Neo Tokyo in 2018, decades after an atomic bomb decimated the original city. It follows a teenage biker gang who get mixed up in a secret military project involving very old-looking children. It's essentially a coming-of-age movie, when an experiment goes wrong, and one of the biker gang members (Tetsuo) turns into a psychic villain, hell-bent on destroying anyone who tries to get close to him.

Waterford Film for All screens independent films in Garter Lane every Tuesday at 7.30 pm.