The 8th Tokyo FILMeX festival closed last night, with the prestigious Grand Prize awarded to Tehilim by Raphael Nadjari, a Franco/Israeli/American co-production.
The Tokyo FILMeX is the independent counterpart to the Tokyo International Film Festival, which is held several weeks earlier. Headed by festival director Kanako Hayashi and programming director Shozo Ichiyama (Office Kitano), the festival showcases around forty feature films each year, both documentaries and dramas.
This Japanese festival presents chiefly Asian films, but is also open to other national industries, as illustrated by the selection of four majority French co-productions: Tehilim, To Each His Own Cinema (a film celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival), Disengagement by Amos Gitai, and Eat, for This Is My Body by Michelange Quay.
This year’s festival jury was led by the Korean director Lee Chang-dong and included Christian Jeune (Cannes Film Festival’s Deputy Artistic Delegate), Dorothee Wenner (director of the Berlinale Talent Campus), Isao Yukisada, (Japanese film director), and Yutaka Yamazaki, (Japanese cinematographer).
