From October 27 to November 5, Tokyo Midtown will host Asia’s second-largest celebration of cinema, the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF). Fielding a diverse lineup of domestic directors and foreign entrants, in typical Japanese fashion TIFF will also be paying tribute to tradition with a selection of remastered classics, including a 4K remaster of Akira Kurosawa’s term-defining Rashomon.
2025 marks the 38th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival, with the inaugural edition screening in 1985 (with the event being held annually from 1991). A celebration of film in every lens and language, TIFF is the premier event in Japan’s cinematic calendar, with first-time screenings, local debuts, and lovingly crafted restorations populating the many participating filmhouses.
Last Year’s Highlights
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II was the centerpiece of TIFF’s 37th edition, with this sequel to the original historical epic having been 24 years in the making. A fellow period-action film, 11 Rebels by director Kazuya Shiraishi, was the opener to the festival. Shiraishi’s retelling of the 19th century Boshin War would go on to secure several domestic honors, including awards at both the Yokohama Film Festival and the Mainichi Film Awards. French comedy, Marcello Mio, directed by Christophe Honore, was 2024’s curtain closer. TIFF 37 also introduced the Women’s Empowerment section to festival proceedings, a theme that is only built upon at this year’s event.
A competition as much as it is a festival, dozens of titles contend for several prestigious awards, with Daichi Yoshida’s offbeat black-and-white comedy Teki Cometh sweeping the Grand Prix (Best Film), Best Director, and Best Actor Awards in 2024.
Coming Soon: TIFF 2025
As we look towards 2025’s red carpet it can be difficult to choose what screens to visit, with the 10-day festival spanning a dozen venues that will be screening over 100 films. Here is but a teaser trailer for the blockbuster event that will be TIFF 2025.
Hamnet (Chloe Zhao)
The overarching theme of this year’s festival is female empowerment, with one of TIFF’s key objectives being to address the gender disparity behind the camera. To this end, the closing film of TIFF 2025 will be Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. In 2021, the Chinese-born Zhao became only the second woman (following Kathryn Bigelow) to win the Academy Award for Best Director, picking up the gold statuette for Nomadland. Her latest work is an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, a fictional account of the death of William Shakespeare’s only son, the titular Hamnet. Zhao’s adaptation has already met with critical acclaim, having premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September. With Paul Mescal starring as the legendary wordsmith, and Jessie Buckley by his side as Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, the narrative is one of love and profound loss, charting the grieving process and how it led to Shakespeare producing one of his seminal works, The Tragedy of Hamlet.
Tokyo Taxi (Yoji Yamada)
The heart of this year’s festival, Tokyo Taxi will be the 91st work of 94-year-old Yamada’s acclaimed filmmaking career. Known internationally for his samurai trilogy, 2002’s The Twilight Samurai was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards. Tokyo Taxi will almost certainly feature fewer katana, but what it may lack in bloodshed, it promises to make up in emotional evocativeness. Led by the omnipresent stage and screen icon Takuya Kimura and Yamada’s leading muse Chieko Baisho, the pair portray a taxi driver and elderly passenger respectively, as the latter is being driven to a nursing home in Yokohama as she reflects on her tumultuous past. Director Yamada has long focused his work on commenting on Japanese daily life and Baisho’s Madame Sumire epitomizes this motif. A heartwarming tale, viewers may be reminded of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car and Satoshi Kon’s Millenium Actress.
Climbing for Life (Junji Sakamoto)
It’s the goal of TIFF to celebrate firsts. Many young directors may debut at the festival, Chloe Zhao (along with Lee Sang-il) will receive the coveted Kurosawa Award, and Sakamoto’s Climbing for Life will commemorate Junko Tabei, the first woman to summit Mount Everest. Played by Sayuri Yoshinaga, Tabei’s 1975 ascent is presented not only as a personal triumph, but as a feat that captivated the globe. Even a 2012 diagnosis of stomach cancer did not ground this trailblazing mountaineer, as Tabei continued to climb until her death in 2016. 50 years on from her momentous summit, it’s fitting that Sakamoto’s biopic will be the curtain raiser for TIFF, as much like Tabei herself it will be the first of many greats that follow.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader)
2025 marks the 40th anniversary of TIFF’s inaugural event; it also marks 40 years since the release of Paul Schrader’s controversial Yukio Mishima biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. For decades it has been shrouded in a veil of political sensitivity, culminating in a de-facto ban from Japanese cinemas. But at TIFF ’25, Schrader’s retelling of the life of arguably Japan’s most contentious literary mind will finally be released to national audiences. Schrader wrote and directed Mishima a decade after penning the script for Taxi Driver, giving him the backing of Hollywood icons Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. However, despite starring Ken Ogata and being co-financed by Toho Towa, Mishima was domestically dead-on-arrival, owing to the infamous demise of the film’s subject. During his career, Yukio Mishima was approached several times to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, but ultimately met his end in 1970, committing public seppuku (ritual suicide) following a failed coup to reinstate the Imperial Emperor. A sensitive subject to say the least, Mishima’s legacy as a literary legend and quasi far-right martyr has ostracized Schrader’s epic — until now.
The Last Blossom (Baku Kinoshita)
This year anime is also well represented at TIFF. For 2025’s splash of color, The Last Blossom promises to bloom brightly. Director Baku Kinoshita, alongside writer Kazuya Konomoto, presents the audience with the final moments of a yakuza member, voiced by Kaoru Kobayashi of Midnight Diner fame, as he replays the story of his life. Kinoshita and Konomoto are also the creative duo behind the Tarantino-esque series Odd Taxi, so expect similarly tight dialogue and an equally compelling narrative from their 2025 feature film.
All photo rights belong to TIFF.
No Comments yet!