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This year’s TIFF essentially confirmed what 2024 is all about in Asian cinema terms: co-productions, Chinese cinema, Asean genre films and a Japanese industry that has gotten back to the top due to its ever present stability. The program was quite interesting in general, as it combined genre with art house in an almost equal ratio, in a rather unusual move for a festival, where the selection tends to linger towars the latter. The result definitely worked, particularly in terms of diversity, with the program including from experimental titles to intense crowdpleasers and everything between. “She Taught Me Serendipity“, “Pavane for an Infant“, and “Harbor Lights” are among the highlights of a selection that includes a number of gems.

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1. Film Review: Sima’s Song (2024) by Roya Sadat © Ton Peters

“Sima’s Song” is an excellent film that manages to highlight the issues Afghanistan faces...

Family dramas in the Japanese movie industry are a dime a dozen; however, it is still the genre in the country the majority of great films come from, and it is easy to say that, “The Harbor Lights”, Mojiri Adachi’s theatrical debut, following a rather successful career on TV, is one of those films.

The Harbor Lights is screening at Tokyo International Film Festival

Akari is a third-generation Korean resident in Japan born in Kobe, the year of the Great Hanshin Earthquake. He is suffering from intense depression, which she mostly drowns in food, and the fact that her always embittered father is taking a divorce from her mother is not helping. In the meantime, her older sister wants to marry and has decided it would be better for her if she and the whole family take Japanese citizenship, something that makes the tension with the father even more intense.