It is less than 2 months until the opening, and films from inside and outside of Japan have been selected one after another! Those films include Japanese and world premiers. We would like to introduce 3 Special Screenings.

“The Academy of the Muses” (15’), which received The Premio Nacional de Cinematografia award, was screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival last year. The director, José Luis Guerin, has been in search of new forms of narrative and dramaturgy, found at the border of fiction and non-fiction. He does this by exploring several formats, such as filmmaking, museum art installations. In his newest film the audience will identify themselves as students in a lecture theatre, witnessing the professor's behavior with their own eyes, and encounter some scenes that will evoke laughter. This is a masterpiece by Guerin, which explores the boundary between documentary and fiction opening up a new frontier in film.

YANG Qing, who was selected as one of the “Youth Program Directors” by the CAA (Creative Artists Agency), in China, which gave him the opportunity, and funding, to shoot his debut film “One Night in Supermarket." His first film won the Best Scriptwriter of Media award at the 12^th Shanghai International Film Festival. Since then Qing has made a new film, “Chongqing Hot Pot”, whose main cast includes CHEN Kun, BAI Baihe, QIN Hao and YU Entai. The film centers around three high school classmates who open a hotpot restaurant in an old bomb shelter in Chongqing. They start digging in order to enlarge the space, and accidentally in the vault of the bank next doors. The scenes are all shot in Chonqing, China.

“Surprise” is a Chinese fantasy comedy, directed by Jiaoshou Yi Xiaoxing in 2015. It is a costume martial-arts comedy riffing on the classic “Journey to the West,” masquerading as a feature film. Spun out of a weekly online sketch show on Youku, and featuring several of the same people, the movie is interesting for the way in which it underlines the importance of online media in contemporary Mainland Chinese cinema as a source of ideas and talent.

Screening dates are to be announced soon! These are must-watch films at the 2016 HIFF!!