Tokyo Film Festival Line-Up

19 September 2008

After a lack-lustre Venice and a solid Toronto, which highlighted a handful of potential Oscar nominees and winners, it's now the turn of Tokyo who announced their full line-up yesterday.

The festival, which is now in it's twenty first year, will screen over three hundred movies from around the world while fifteen films, selected from 690, will be entered in the main competition section.

Turning green is also big on the festival's agenda this year as they will screen a string of nature-conscious pictures throughout the eight day event.

The actors and directors attending the festival will even walk down a green carpet instead of the traditional red there will also be a new Toyota Earth Grand Prix which will be awarded to the best eco-related film in the main program.

Leading the Japanese charge in the main competition line-up is Echo of Silence, directed by actor Atsuro Watabe, and School Days with a Pig by Tetsu Maeda.

There are also two highly anticipated Chinese movies: Claustrophobia, the directorial debut of Ivy Ho and the disaster epic Super Typhoon by Feng Xiaoning.

John Woo's new film Red Cliff, a third century war epic, will raise the curtain on the festival while Pixar's hit Wall-E, due to open in Japan in December, will close the festival.

While no British pictures make the In Competition Line-Up Jennifer Phang's Half Life, which follows a precocious boy and his jaded sister use their imaginative powers to escape a confining home-life, save their self-destructive mother from her charmingly manipulative boyfriend, and finally reinvent their world in a mind bending conclusion, is the only film with a U.S. production credit.