![[Photos of the Powell Street Festival]](../../images/p-season.jpg)
2006–2007 Season
poster by Steve Chow
KIBATSU CINEMA: eccentricity and popular culture in contemporary Japanese film
Thursday, July 26-Sunday, July 29, 2007
Pacific Cinémathèque, 1131 Howe Street
For full schedule and ticket information: www.cinematheque.bc.ca
Info: 604.683.8240
(Must be a Cinémathèque member or a Powell Street Festival Society member and 18 years of age or older)
The Powell Street Festival Society and Pacific Cinémathèque are pleased to present “Kibatsu Cinema,” a four-day celebration of the odd and the eccentric in Japanese pop culture and contemporary Japanese film. Kibatsu is a Japanese word denoting a person or thing that is, by ordinary standards, unusual or unconventional; the array of quirky, smart, and stylish films on display here reveal the influences of various of Japan’s prominent pop-cultural streams: manga and anime, pop and punk music, the famed flamboyance of the country’s street fashions and youth cultures.
Beginning with our delectable festival opener The Taste of Tea, a hilarious, touching, and often fantastical family dramedy, the line-up includes “grrrl-power” anthems Kamikaze Girls and Linda Linda Linda; the heartbreaking documentary hit The Cats of Mirikitani, a favourite on the international festival circuit; the eye-popping experimental narratives Body Drop Asphalt and I WAS BORN, BUT…; and, as our closing film, the stunningly shot, über-stylish Kamome Diner, a tale of three Japanese women afoot in Helsinki that pays tribute to Finnish maverick and master Aki Kaurismäki. Fresh, fun and original, full of the beauty – and, often, the insanity – of everyday life, these provocative works have a knack for turning the uneventful into the resonant, the oddities into the endearing, the over-the-top into the poignant.
There’s also an anime entry, the moving wartime drama The Glass Rabbit, intended for an all-ages audience; making up for the absence of more “mature” anime films in the rest of the program is the fact that many of the festival’s live-action features contain amazing animated sequences. More than half the films in the schedule have never before screened in Vancouver
Programmed by Yuuki Hirano and Miko Hoffman.