Mumbai film fest to celebrate Japanese cinema

New Delhi, Sep 13 (IANS) The 12th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) Oct 21-28 will pay tribute to eight decades of Japanese cinema with a special section.

A collaboration of the Japanese consulate in Mumbai and The Japan Foundation, 35 mm prints of 44 films, both classic and contemporary, will be screened at the fest.

The section will be inaugurated with the all-India premiere of veteran director Yoji Yamada's melodrama 'About Her Brother' (2010).

Organised by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), the festival is a Reliance Big Entertainment Ltd (RBEL) initiative which is the flagship media and entertainment arm of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group.

The movies cover eight decades of Japanese cinema from the early 1930s till date with a variety of genres and styles like traditional family drama, Samurai epic, yakuza thriller, etc.

Some of the other films to be screened at the fest are Akira Kurosawa's 'No Regrets For Our Youth' (1946) and 'Ran' (1985), Masaki Kobayashi's three-part magnum opus 'The Human Condition' (1959), Mikio Naruse's 'When A Woman Ascends The Stairs' (1960) and works of acknowledged masters like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi apart from recent films by iconoclasts like Shuji Terayama and Takashi Miike.

Popular Japanese contemporary director Takashi Koizumi and several international film historians and scholars are expected to attend the festival. A seminar on Japanese cinema is also on the anvil as part of the section.