Nippon Connection: What to know about Frankfurt's Japanese film festival

Movie fans in Germany are in for a treat this week as Frankfurt hosts the Nippon Connection Film Festival celebrating Japanese cinema. 

Now in its 26th year, the festival – running until Sunday June 7th – will showcase films and cultural events at 13 locations around the city. 

This year is the biggest to date featuring 145 short and feature-length films and 87 cultural events, with around 200 filmmakers and artists in attendance. 

Alongside screenings, the two festival centres, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm and Productionhaus NAXOS, will showcase Japanese culture, including arts and crafts and food. 

Organised mainly on a voluntary basis by the non-profit Nippon Connection association, around 100 members bring the event to life every year. Last year around 20,000 people attended the event. 

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The festival is set to open on June 2nd at 7pm with the German premiere of Fujiko, directed by Taichi Kimura. The tragicomedy centres on a single mother struggling to find her place in life in the patriarchal Japanese society of the 1970s and 80s.

The event will be attended by the director, along with Hesse state secretary Christoph Degen and Frankfurt Mayor Mike Josef.

Also on Tuesday, Numakage Public Pool, a documentary about the closing of a much-loved public swimming pool, will screen at Naxos Kino at 7.30pm.  

Many films will be shown with English subtitles but make sure to check before you get tickets.

Workshops covering a variety of topics like sumo wrestling, game design and subtitling Japanese films are also scheduled. 

Richard Mort, a Düsseldorf-based British strategic intelligence consultant and Japanese-English interpreter, is a major fan of the festival and recently wrote an article on LinkedIn to share information and recommendations.

He described the event as "special and incredible" because "it's literally the biggest Japanese film festival in the world, bigger than any in Japan, and for me that says it all".

"I think it brings colour to Frankfurt, which is often a city strongly linked to trade fairs and banking, which is accurate, but I think anything which shows its more colourful side is welcome," he added.

What else to see at the festival

Mort was due to be an interpreter at the event but could not attend this year. 

"I felt the next best thing would be to create one of my article specials covering a whole event, and I'm glad I did that," he said, noting that the strong response from people online signals that it resonated. 

As well as going through the programme to share highlights, Mort added on LinkedIn:

"For me, I would buy tickets for: Kei Ishikawa's A Pale View of Hills, fresh from Cannes; the Tatsuya Nakadai retrospective, on real film prints; Yusuke Iwasaki's AnyMart, just awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). And anything with Anna Yamada, this year's Rising Star."

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Although Mort has been based in Düsseldorf since April 2021, he maintains strong connections to Japan, where he lived from 2002 to 2021.

"I consider myself a bridge between Europe and Japan, and I retain Japanese permanent residency status and long-term residency in Germany," he said. 

The festival has grown over the years, with director and co-founder Marion Klomfass being honoured by the Japanese Foreign Minister for her work in German-Japanese cultural exchange. 

Check out the full programme here.