Special Guest for 2016: Yuki Tanada

We are very excited to announce that Yuki Tanada, the acclaimed director behind the 2012 film The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky, will be our special guest for this year’s programme! She will be attending he following screenings:

• ICA, London
  6 & 9 February 2016
• Watershed, Bristol
  8 February 2016
• Phoenix, Leicester
  11 February 2016
• QUAD, Derby
  12 February 2016

After studying filmmaking at the Image Forum in Tokyo, Tanada wrote, directed, and starred in Moru, an independently produced film which won the grand prize at the Pia Film Festival in 2011. Tanada followed with a documentary on the folk singer Wataru Takada in 2003 before directing the erotic comic drama Moon and Cherry in 2004. Her recent films include One Million Yen Girl (2008) which was honoured with the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award and was screened as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme in 2011, Ain’t No Tomorrows (2008), The Cowards Who Looked to the Sky (2012), screening as part of this year’s programme, the Mourning Recipe (2013) and Romance (2015). Tanada has written scripts for many of her films as well as contributed the script to Mika Ninagawa’s Sakuran (2007).

“With her films manifesting a unique wit and a genuine warmth and affection for her characters, [Tanada] is one of the most exciting arrivals on the scene” Jasper Sharp, Midnight Eye

“There are only a handful of filmmakers like Tanada in Japan today, those whose work so keenly and unsentimentally examines the inner lives of everyday Japanese.” Chris MaGee, J Film Pow Wow