by Éireann Mannino, Contributor

Japan Society of NYC has fully embraced the remote cinema model with their ongoing and rotational film series. With two full scale festivals under their belt, including the current showstopper of a program, 21st Century Japan, I’d say they have mastered the art and are doing a service to the medium through a model of greater and sustained accessibility. 

 With the turn of the new year, it seems a perfect occasion to reevaluate the continuously changing shape of cinema of this, the first 20 years of our 21st century, which has seen perhaps more transformation in the medium film and film presentation than almost the entire second half of the 20th century combined. The entire selection of films, Co-presented by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in collaboration with Visual Industry Promotion Organization are available until the 25th at Japan Society’s online streaming site, which means that we have entered the final stretch. Late as it is to be announcing this incredible assemblage of films, there is still ample opportunity to deep dive into this carefully curated chorus of cinematic voices. 

Among the abundant selections of this century’s burgeoning talents are the comparatively large proportion of female voices, like Yukiko Mishima, Mika Ninagawa, Satoko Yokohama, Naomi Kawase, Chie Hayakawa and Miwa Nishikawa, who are indeed shaping that which we think of as Japanese Cinema. That the voices of women in Japanese cinema are not a spotlight of this program but are substantively woven into the curatorial fabric shows that parity is not only possible but that its absence is inexcusable. 

With a broad framing device, 21st Century Japan spans genre, production style, time period, tone and more as it offers at least one feature per year along the course of 2000 to 2020, and offers a sense of scope to the names like Hirokazu Koreeda, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Mika Ninagawa who were not always household names, but are now entering the know of even the uninitiated. 

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future (2003), a textured and enigmatic early experiment in digital feature filmmaking, Yukiko Mishima’s sensuous, chromatically saturated and atmospherically dense Red (aka, The Shape of Red, 2019), Miwa Nishikawa’s morally contorted contest between brothers, Yureru (2006), and Shuichi Okita’s warmly, if not indirectly hilarious and moving The Artist’s Habitat (2018), are but mere highlights of a program stacked to the rafters with strong and diverse visions. Particularly generous is the “Filmmakers on the Rise” sidebar of free shorts and features that focus on emerging talents. Additionally there is a slew of free talks with filmmakers, and a panel that digs into the question of what 21st Century Japanese Cinema is in and of itself, to which this curatorial project is one such conceptual answer. 

The crown jewel, my vote not only for best in show, but a prediction for best of 2021 outright, is Shion Sono’s The Red Post of Escher Street, about a misfit group of strangers who all show up for an open casting call for a director’s new film project. Sono’s most recent effort is so visceral, so tender, so exposed and untethered, so heartfelt. It endears and perplexes in equal measure, playing with a kind of fractal continuity that dives from one person’s story into the next, deeper and deeper. While laying these character’s lives, vulnerabilities and also courage bare, Sono eviscerates the patriarchal politics of the film industry…. as Sono does…. and utterly topples idol worship. This is a film about the restlessness of regular people, filled to the brim with trauma, joy, failure, hope and hate, screaming love into the ear of the world. The thing is, sordid as his oeuvre is, Sono takes all his characters seriously, whether they play with parody or not. It is easy to see that he loves each one of them with his whole heart because each one is so potent, even when fleeting. He honors them in their highs and lows, in their triumphs and indignities, in their mundanity and exaggeration, and refuses to offer us anyone who is simply any one way or the other. They are crackling bundles of embers, contradictions, dreams, storms of feeling and vitality. 

On the larger repertory side of the spectrum, the inclusion of Twilight Samurai (2002) in 21st Century Japan signals that this is truly a barometer for the breadth of my own journey with Japanese cinema. Yoji Yamada’s arguable masterpiece (and one of three entries in his beloved Samurai Trilogy) was a clear humanistic bell that rung out just after the turn of the 21st century. Receiving an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, it was one of the most transportive period dramas I had ever seen. It plays so intimately, is so tenderly attuned to the everyday and to the warmth of family that one was effortlessly transposed to Meiji era Japan, enveloped in the sentiment and struggle of a particular family as a microcosm of greater systemic change. 

Take this opportunity and at least dip your toes in an enriching body of works that one could scarcely see under any other conditions.