IT was a glorious night of awards as the 34th Tokyo International Film Festival ended last November 8. Kim Yunsoo with Sunday & Calm Sea was the winner of the Amazon Prime Video Take One Award; and Sangoumi Midori’s Under the Bridge became the recipient of the Amazon Prime Video Take One Award Special Jury Prize.
For the Asian Future section, the three jury members admitted to having a wide range of opinions, and after a discussion that was “as long as a feature-length film,” they decided to give the Best Film Award to the “most honest film”—Hossein Tehrani’s World, Northern Hemisphere. In the Competition section, Just Remembering by Matsui Daigo was the winner of the Audience Award.
The award for Best Artistic Contribution was handed to Crane Lantern by Hilal Baydarov, a feat with the director doing all the technical work by himself. Most interesting was the result of the competition for Best Actor—a four-way tie for Amir Aghaee, Fatih Al, Baris Yildiz, Onur Buldu of the Turkish film The Four Walls.
Sebu Hiroko, one of the jurors, had this to say about the actors: “We were impressed with the energy and the charm of the four leading cast members in this film. Although they were displaced from their homes due to modernization and capitalism, through their passion for music, they find comfort in and friendship with each other. Their chemistry is endearing and elevates the film above loss and grief.”
Julia Chávez (The Other Tom), was this year’s Best Actress. Of Chávez, Jury President Isabelle Huppert said: “It is always very moving when you hear an actress with a voice of her own, a body language of her own, something unique.” According to Huppert, the actress “delivers an unsentimental as well as deeply touching performance. A kind of non-acting performance which makes her so true, so evident. In fact, she doesn’t act, she does better than this: she just is.”
Kazakhstan’s Darezhan Omirbaev Poet (Akyn) was declared the Best Director. The jury chose him, in the words of one of the jurors, Chris Fujiwara, “because we were so impressed by the artistic personality that he expresses so vividly in this film, with the freedom of narrative that he allows himself, and the great mastery and maturity with which he reflects on the situation of cinema among the other arts in contemporary society.”
To La Civil, directed by Teodora Ana Mihai, was given the Special Jury Prize. Explaining the special prize, Lorna Tee, another juror, spoke of the filmmaker “having masterfully crafted a narrative that gives us complex characters and everyone is complicit in the unending cycles of violence and loss. It is an accomplished first feature by a director not afraid to give us a film based on true stories that had taken many lives in a country torn apart by drugs and violence.” Tee expressed the jury’s hope “that the film will shed more urgency on the situation and that the conflict will find resolution and redemption for everyone involved.”
Great victory for the night went to Kosovo’s Vera Dreams of the Sea, which received the Tokyo Grand Prix, The Governor of Tokyo Award. It was Isabelle Huppert who gave the most eloquent description of the winning film: Vera Dreams of the Sea is simultaneously a touching portrait of a woman grappling with the death of her husband and a commentary into the structures of patriarchy that strangle those who do not participate in the deep-set rules of the game set by men. The director deftly navigates the story of Vera, who is saddled with the baggage of history of a country that allows for a quiet but insidious threat of violence to be inflicted upon individuals who are seeking for change in the society that they live in. Huppert summed up the power of the film: “The personal and the collective collide in a confident and profound manner in the film, brought forth by an assured direction and powerful performances in a film that adds to the amazing array of films by a courageous new generation of female filmmakers from Kosovo.”
Kaltrina Krasniqi, director of the winning film, admitted to “screaming, laughing and crying from joy” after having been informed that her film had just won the Grand Prix no less. This is the first time that Kosovo had joined the Tokyo International Film Festival. Arber Mehmeti, Charge d’Affaires ad interim, Embassy of the Republic of Kosovo in Tokyo, appeared onstage to accept the award for Ms. Krasniqi. Ushioda Tsutomu, Vice Governor of Tokyo, presented the award on behalf of Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko.
In her closing comments, Isabelle Huppert, on behalf of the jury, noted how they were “confronted with works by both established artists and new voices, representing various communities in different countries of the world.” The actress observed “the modernity of the images of society that the films offered” where before, “a folkloric view of cultures has often been prevalent in world cinema.” She talked about the entries under The Competition, which “gave us many portrayals of women. The protagonists of Vera Dreams of the Sea, La Civil and The Other Tom all face overwhelming difficulties: corruption, crime, violence, abuse and neglect. Each film shows that these problems belong to an entire social system and the legacy of a past that continues to oppress people.” She underscored how “none of the three protagonists is shown as a victim,” with the women possessing the ability “to recognize and confront her enemy.”
TIFF chairman Ando Hiroyasu, true to the formality of the Japanese, waxed poetic and pragmatic about how we “were fortunate to be blessed with beautiful autumn weather except for the second day” and announced: “The 34th Tokyo International Film Festival is hereby closed.”