The Japan Media Arts Festival Program

Fri, 17. 3., 21:00Sat, 18. 3., 19:00

with the friendly support of

90 min

The Japan Media Arts Festival is an annual international festival that honors outstanding works from a diverse range of media. Since its inception in 1997, it has recognized significant works of great artistry and creativity. Last year, the festival received 4,417 entries from 87 countries and regions around the world. Award-winning works are exhibited both within Japan and abroad by The Agency of Cultural Affairs of the Government of Japan, which aims to develop and promote the creation of media arts by focusing primarily on the new generation of artists.

By means of animation, a medium divorced from physical, temporal and spatial constraints, women are seen to prance with true freedom across the screen. Their expressions are simultaneously those of innocent girls and mischievous little devils who love to play tricks on people. These are women with the confidence to draw on the diversity innate to them from birth and use it to respond more flexibly to whatever external situation they encounter.
In this program, I tried to compile expressions of female existence as described by female writers living in Japan. I want viewers to appreciate this intensely feminine freedom to the full.
(Prof. Okamoto Mitsuko)

The Evening Traveling

KONDOH Akino

2002,

04'00

Excellence Award, Japan Media Arts Festival 2002

Inspired by the eponymous song, the film features the artist’s trademark protagonist: a girl with a pageboy haircut, who is performing a strange dance as she undergoes a transformation presented through the fantastic perspective typical for Akino Kondoh.

Papillon Yoshiko

Shinjuko

2004,

03'25

It is a most important work that Shinjuko produced in 2004.

Yamasuki Yamazaki

Shishi YAMAZAKI

2013,

02'22

Jury Selection, Japan Media Arts Festival 2013

When you are completely happy, your joy feeds into itself and you forget the reason why. As the feeling passes through your entire body it embraces even sorrow and anger until it blossoms.

Summer’s Puke is Winter’s Delight

KABUKI Sawako

2016,

02‘59

Painful events become memories over time. Still, we vomit and eat again – a never-ending cycle.

The Blooms

KUGENUMA Ayasa

2013,

05'40

Deep down in the forest there lived flower fairies in flower gardens, waking up with the sunrise, eating sweets, and chatting with each other. One day they had a visit.

Sunset Flower Blooming

HU Yuanyuan

2012,

10'19

Jury Selection, Japan Media Arts Festival 2012

Set in China in the 1960s, the story opens with an old woman cooling off in her garden. As the sky turns orange with the setting of the sun, an evening primrose begins to bloom. Prompted by the sight of the flower, the woman recalls her childhood and dreams.

Spring Sleeper

MATSUMOTO Saki

2016,

02'04

On New Year’s Day, the heroine visits her grandmother in hospital. Grandmother does not seem to have changed. She looks very fine but forgets old memories.

Snow Hut

MIZUSHIRI Yoriko

2013,

05'22

Jury Selection, Japan Media Arts Festival 2013

A snow hut in the middle of a rice field. What can you do in a space full of whiteness and quietness? Until spring comes and the snow hut melts and loses its shape.

Airy Me

KUNO Yoko

2013,

05'38

New Face Award, Japan Media Arts Festival 2103

A test subject is administered daily medication by a nurse in a hospital where mysterious medical experiments take place. One day the nurse presses a switch and the test subject suddenly mutates into a chimera. What will happen if the non-human creature continues to hold human desires?

Kiya Kiya

KONDOH Akino

2012,

06'39

Jury Selection, Japan Media Arts Festival 2012

The film’s title derives from an old Japanese expression that the artist came across in a collection of short stories about girls by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. It describes a sense of “inexplicably nostalgic anxiety”, or a kind of déjà-vu.

Hide and Seek

SHIRAISHI Keiko

2012,

07'52

They live in a residential town surrounded by the ocean and mountains. Since that day, this town has been in complete darkness. Hidden in the darkness now are the streetlights, roads home, a mother, and a baby in her womb.

Birth-Weaving

WAKAMI Arisa, ARAI Chie, KOGUMA Atsuko

2015,

19'04

There are as many child delivery stories as there are people. Despite all the progress of medicine and science, lives still get lost during childbirth. We speak with mothers about the intimate experience of giving birth – an event that is both unique and an everyday thing.

Festival 5 - 9 March, 2025