Cape Town, 8 September 2022 (TDI): The Embassy of Japan will host the 28th Japanese Film Festival in South Africa. The event will be co-organized by The Japan Foundation.
The much anticipated 28th Japanese Film Festival is just around the corner. The Embassy of Japan in South Africa together with Japan Foundation are bringing four exciting films to both Johannesburg and Cape Town. pic.twitter.com/z5XpqQ4w6D
— Embassy of Japan in South Africa/在南アフリカ共和国日本国大使館 (@JP_emb_inSA) September 6, 2022
According to the embassy, the 28th Film Festival will take place in October from 14th to the 16th of October, in the Rosebank Nouveau cinema in Johannesburg.
Afterward, the 28th Japanese Film Festival will also take place at Labia Theater in Cape Town. It will take place from the 4th to the 6th of November 2022.
Films at the Festival
During the Film Festival organized by Japan, four films about family, living with difficulties, and protecting what you love will be displayed.
The first film in line at the Festival is The Lone Ume Tree. It is a touching drama following the lives of an autistic man and his mother.
Lone Ume Tree highlights different aspects of troubles met by an aging single mother and her child with developmental disabilities. It shows that even though people now support disabled persons still the difference exists in how they deal with disabled and healthy people.
Moreover, the film poses very urgent and significant questions that current Japanese society and families with disabled members face in the 21st century.
Second in the line is the House of the Lost on the Cape. It is an animated film about two girls adrift in the world who start to stay with an old lady in her mysterious house on the coast.
Two young girls separated from their family, come across a strange old lady. Accordingly, the lady offers them her hospitality at her home. The house brings the opportunity to start afresh for the two girls and starts to breathe new life into the girls slowly.
The film sheds light on the importance of family pointing out that a family does not always consist of people related to you by blood. The plot is depicted when the three strangers band together to protect their home from a menacing entity threatening to destroy it.
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A Long Goodbye and Liars of Asahi-za
Another film the Festival will display is A Long Goodbye. The film represents a family coping with memory loss and saying goodbye. It features a family who gets to know that their father has dementia on his 70th birthday. They hey are all concerned, but react differently due to their individual situations.
The family watches as the husband and father regress due to the disease and loses their memory. Therefore, they help prepare their mother for his farewell and prepare themselves for the emotions to follow.
The Festival will end with Cinematic Liars of Asahi-za, an uplifting drama about a small group of people trying to save a 100-year-old cinema.
