25 films and dramas screened free at Japanese Film Festival

The Japan Foundation will hold the largest international Japanese Film Festival (JFF) ever this June. Twenty-three films of various genres will be screened in the first two weeks, followed by two TV drama series in the following two weeks.

These movies will be streamed for free to 27 countries/regions with captions in up to 16 languages.

The Japan Foundation hopes that the Japanese Film Festival will provide audiences with new and interesting views of Japan, its people and culture through these wonderful Japanese movies and dramas. 

Categories include comedy, horror, family, drama, food, LGBTQ+, romance and anime.

In Vietnam, the festival will be held from June 5 at 10:00 a.m. to July 3 at 10:00 a.m. and will consist of two periods (June 5-19 for the screening of films and June 19-July 3 for the screening of TV series). All movies and TV series will have English and Vietnamese subtitles.

Some films in the list of Japanese Film Festival this year.

People can watch them for free anywhere and anytime during the specified periods only by registering an account on the free streaming site  https://watch.jff.jpf.go.jp/page/jffonline2024/ and having a stable local Internet connection.  

Among the films is Single8, a raw coming-of-age story set in the 1970s. Obsessed with Star Wars, a high school student named Hiroshi (Uemura Yu) tries to make his own sci-fi movie featuring a large spaceship. Joined by his movie-loving friends, they begin building a fake spaceship and filming it with an 8mm camera.

Eventually, they learn that a movie is not just about shooting, but that the story and themes are important. They work hard, write a script and show it to Natsumi, a girl in their class (Takaishi Akari). She agrees to appear in the movie and they begin production.

The director, Konaka Kazuya, known for directing many episodes of the Japanese sci-fi TV series Ultraman, was influenced by the works of Steven Spielberg. The movie is a brilliant retelling of his own youth in the 1970s, when he was passionately making movies on 8mm.

The Handsome Suite, a fantasy romantic comedy, will be screened at the 2024 Japanese Film Festival.

The list of TV dramas includes The Handsome Suit, a fantasy romantic comedy with a 1980s pop sensibility about a man who worries about his appearance and lives in a dream world.

Takuro (Tsukaji Muga) runs a cheap restaurant. He has a kind heart, but due to his lack of confidence in his looks, he is constantly rejected by women. When the beautiful Hiroko (Kitagawa Keiko) comes to work part-time in his restaurant, he is completely taken with her, but is rejected when he asks her out. One day he gets a suit that makes him handsome as soon as he wears it. When Takuro tries on the suit, he is shocked by his transformation. He starts working as a model (Tanihara Shosuke) under the name Annin and enjoys the life of being handsome. He is sure that Hiroko will like him now.

This fantasy romantic comedy with a 1980s pop sensibility was made in 2008, before terms like "lookism" became popular. It finds comedy in an exaggerated comparison of ideas around "ugly" and "beautiful," but aims to question what makes a person truly attractive.

In 2016, the Japan Foundation launched the Japanese Film Festival with the aim of sharing Japanese cinema with 10 ASEAN countries and Australia. JFF expanded to China and India in 2017, and then to Russia in 2018. In 2023, JFF was held in 10 countries with more than 120,000 participants.