The 10th UPAF will be held online from September to Dec 2024, and in person at Uno Port Inn in Uno, Tamanno-city on Jan 10-11, 2025, and Hokancho 4-Chome Lounge Kado in Okayama-city on Jan 12-13, 2025, both small cafes. For the online portion, we will make 2-3 programs available for on-demand purchase for 7 days, every 3 weeks, starting from Sept 27, 2024. Our festival is run by volunteers’ efforts and with small grants, so this format is an experiment for us not to burden stuff and the audience, and to be able to continue. All screenings will be with English and Japanese subtitles. For the films that we translate/subtitle, we will add subtitles for the Deaf and hard of hearing.
While always cherishing our big theme, “Life, Art, Film,” UPAF also sets a mini-theme each time based on what’s important in the world, and curates several films accordingly. After the pandemic, the world we live in today is wrapped in dark clouds of war and division. We have set the mini-theme of the 10th UPAF to be “Palestine” and stream/screen 7 films with high artistic values and strong historicities. We strive to program them chronologically so that viewers can grasp Palestine’s history since 1948. Some context explanations will be provided if desired. We want to ponder with our viewers why the US and UK continue to support the Israeli government’s military actions against civilians in Palestine and how we, as Japanese, are related to that power map of the world. Besides that mini-theme, we bring films from the countries many foreign workers in Japan are from to help us understand our non-Japanese neighbors a bit more. We will also have the Japanese Short Film Program with the works selected from this year’s call for entries.
Please note: Most of this year’s films can be streamed only inside Japan due to the restrictions by the distributors. Many of them may be available in your countries -Please check them out!
Grants from the Japan Arts Council and the Ohdake Foundation support this event.
2024
9/27-10/3 Online Screening #1 (pay-per-view style)
10/18-10/24 Online Screening #2
11/8-11/14 Online Screening #3
11/29-12/5 Online Screening #4
12/20-12/26 Online Screening #5
2025
1/10-11 Uno Port Inn
1/12-13 Hokancho 4-chome Lounge Kado (a cafe in Okayama-City) In-person screening
From the Curator
I chose “Palestine” to be the mini-theme of the 10th UPAF because the so-called Middle East seemed to be a far, far-away land when I grew up in Japan. It is really, West Asia. And I am Asian too! I grew up in the midst of the bubble economy and our eyes were always set towards the West. I did not have particular admiration towards the West, but felt “they” were more advanced, and they seemed closer to us than the “Middle East.” As a byproduct of Japan’s economic rise, I got a scholarship to study in the US, and I have stayed there ever since.
As I have lived in Brooklyn, NY for more than 30 years and taught at universities in NY for 17 years, I have met students from Palestinian diaspora who have dozens of family members in Gaza, and I also have a Palestinian filmmaker friend from Gaza. They are losing their family members one by one now, as we speak, and to them, what’s happening in Gaza is continuing since 1948. They have been fighting the whole time while I was watching MTV and Top Gun and Ghostbusters as a teeanager in Tokyo. And what they are experiencing now is their worst nightmare ever.
I have spent the past year closely seeing and cheering for diverse American students rising up against the absurdity, lies, and hypocrisy of this world filled with grownups’ greed. Those students are Arabs, Jews, South and East and West Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, etc. I have also seen many American citizens, especially Jews, rising up against the US support of the Israeli government because they don’t want their taxes to be used to kill Gazan children. What I see here are often not covered by the mainstream media or reported with mal-intentioned twists.
As I protested on the street and helped organizing a Palestine film series at a university where I teach, I learned so much from many people who have spent years and decades fighting for Palestine. I also watched many Palestine or Palestinian films. I thought I knew a bit, but realized I had no idea about the depth of Palestinian films. I was moved by those Palestinian filmmakers’ creativity, talent, and passion for storytelling. In terms of mass killing of civilians, we Japanese were once victims and perpetrators. How do the war which our parents and grandparents experienced and the material life which the Japanese enjoy today relate to the genocide in West Asia which we are witnessing today?
We will stream and screen 5-6 good Palestinian films that help us trace the history of Palestine as they let us feel the connection between us and the things unfolding there. We may want to avoid looking at it, but we know we should not, and if we really look at it straight, I believe we can connect and find our historicities in our own ways. More than anything, I hope you’d be surprised by the quality of those films as I did.
Besides Palestinian films, we will also stream/screen good films from China, India, Myanmar, etc, as well as Japanese shorts chosen from the call-for-entries. Drama, documentary, animation, SF documentary, experimental… you name it. We look forward to seeing you there!
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