SHORT SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL & ASIA 2015

The last program for the last day of the festival was Asia International & Japan Competition Program F, and we had directors and casts greeting the audience.

Actress Wu Ke-Xi from “The Palace On The Sea”,
Director Tsukasa Kishimoto and Shogen from “Kerama Blue”,
and Director Ken Ochiai from “Dance Dance Dance”.

The director of “The Palace On the Sea”, Midi Z., who was born in Myanmar and raised in Taiwan, is becoming very famous since his recent feature “Ice Poison” was highly recommended in Berlin International Film Festival.

Wu, who has been also casted in his recent feature, shared the audience about how they had a taugh time filming in Myanmar because of the country’s regulations, and how she is going to work in Thai restaurant in this summer or autumn to fit the environment and learn its language for his next film.
I felt Z’s passion to film, and Wu’s willingness to play the role.

And Kishimoto, who has won the award 4 years ago in our film festival, came back to share the beauty of Okinawa once again.
In the new short, there is scene that a foreign tourist and a local man, acted by Shogen, has a funny conversation because they do not understand each other’s language.

For example, a tourist say “How come you don’t have a bed in Japanese room?”, Shogen answeres “Okay, we are leaving in 5 minutes.”

The laughter came out of the audience in such scenes, but Shogen shared the audience that he had a difficult time playing his role because in actual life, he does understand and speak English very well.

Ochiai, who also has won an award, actually two awards in recent years, shared why he decided to talk about the 3.11 earthquake in Japan, and also why he had decided to cast Dean Fujioka, who has not been very famous in Japan when he was shooting, but became to be one of the actors to attract many interest among Japanese people within a year.

We had several question from the audience, and I’m sure it was a very enjoyable program to start the last day.