The 10th UPAF will be held online from September to Dec 2024, and in person at Lounge Kado, a small cafe in Okayama City, in Jan 2025. For the online portion, we will make 1-2 programs available for on-demand purchase for 7 days, every 3 weeks. Our festival is run by volunteers’ efforts and with small grants, so this format is an experiment for us not to burden stuff and the audience, and to be able to continue. All screenings will be with English and Japanese subtitles. For the films that we translate/subtitle, we will add the subtitles for Deaf and Hard-of-hearing.
While always cherishing our big theme “Life, Art, Film,” UPAF also sets a mini-theme each time based on what’s important in the world, and curates several films accordingly. After the pandemic, the world we live in today is wrapped in dark clouds of war and division. We have set the mini-theme of the 10th UPAF to be “Palestine” and plan to screen 5-6 films with high artistic values and strong historicities. We plan to program them in chronological order so that viewers will be able to grasp Palestine’s history since 1948. Some context explanations will be provided if desired. We want to ponder with our viewers why the US and UK continue to support Israel government’s military actions against civilians in Palestine, and how we as Japanese are related to that power map of the world. Besides that mini-theme, we want to bring films from the countries that many foreign workers in Japan are from, to help ourselves to understand our non-Japanese neighbors a bit more. We will also have the Japanese Short Film Program with the works selected from this year’s call for entries.
Please note: Most of the films this year need to be geo-blocked to within Japan. The online streamings are for the people in Japan only. Many of them may be available in your countries -Please check them out!
Schedule (will be updated as the programs finalize）
#1: 9/27-10/3 JST
The history of Palestine through good films #1: 1948 Nakba
– 『Salt of This Sea』Dramatic feature
– 『LYD』 SF Documentary
#2: 10/18-10/24 JST
The history of Palestine through good films #2: 1987-93 The First Intifada + Highly celebrated drama film about Vietnamese workers living in Japan
– 『Along the Sea』Dramatic feature from Japan about illegal Vietnamese workers in Japan
– 『The Wanted 18』 Creative Documentary from Palestine
#3: 11/8-11/14 JST
The history of Palestine through good films #3: 1967 The Six Day War + Imaginative dance doc from a farming village in China + Japan Shorts #1 (selected from the call-for-entry 2024)
– 『When I Saw You』The second feature from the world’s first Palestinian woman director Annemarie Jacir. Palestine’s Academy Award entry.
– 『Self-Portrait at 47km: 2020』 Super imaginative dance documentary from contenmorary China’s farming village
– 『Reveal Man』 One of the three selected films from a call-for-entries for UPAF’s Japan Shorts program
#4: 11/29-12/5 JST
Self Documentary from Palestine and Japan! The history of Palestine through good films #4: 2008-09 Attack on Gaza after the Second Intifada + Japan Shorts #2 (selected from the call-for-entry 2024) + maybe one more (TBA)
– 『Where Should the Birds Fly』Gaza’s reality in 2008-09 recorded by Gaza’s first woman filmmaker Fida Qishta
– 『Ahmad Alive』 A brand new “vertical” self-doc (37min) shot with Ahmad’s phone while he was escaping the Israeli attack on Gaza since Oct 2023.
– 『so this is what it feels like…』A strong film made by a Chinese woman director living and working in Japan. Director Yuan Shuohan’s second official invitation to UPAF Japan Shorts.
#5: 12/20-12/26 JST
The history of Palestine through good films #5: Excellent Palestinian Drama Film + Poetic Docu-fiction from the Divided India + Japan Shorts #3 (selected from the call-for-entry 2024)
– 『200 Meters』A contemporary drama feature with superb acting by Ali Suliman. Separated from his injured son by Israel’s apartheid wall, a Palestinian father in the West Bank undertakes a perilous journey to cross a distance of just 200 meters.
– 『A Night of Knowing Nothing』Payal Kapadia’s feature-length film debut (poetic documentary with strong fictional elements) about the student uprising in India, which she was a part of. Kapadia won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2024 for a new dramtic feature.
– 『I Will Dump My Mother Someday』One of the three selected films from a call-for-entries for UPAF’s Japan Shorts program
In-person Event: 1/10-1/13/2025 @Hokancho 4-chome Lounge Kado, a cafe in Okayama City
This event is supported by grants from the Japan Arts Council and the Ohdake Foundation.
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Poster art: Ryuichi Akada
Website Design: Miyo Yanagawa
Co-Directors: Reiko Tahara & Kozo Max Uesugi
From the Curator
I chose “Palestine” to be the mini-theme of the 10th UPAF because the so-called Middle East seemed to be a far, far-away land when I grew up in Japan. It is really, West Asia. And I am Asian too! I grew up in the midst of the bubble economy and our eyes were always set towards the West. I did not have particular admiration towards the West, but felt “they” were more advanced, and they seemed closer to us than the “Middle East.” As a byproduct of Japan’s economic rise, I got a scholarship to study in the US, and I have stayed there ever since.
As I have lived in Brooklyn, NY for more than 30 years and taught at universities in NY for 17 years, I have met students from Palestinian diaspora who have dozens of family members in Gaza, and I also have a Palestinian filmmaker friend from Gaza. They are losing their family members one by one now, as we speak, and to them, what’s happening in Gaza is continuing since 1948. They have been fighting the whole time while I was watching MTV and Top Gun and Ghostbusters as a teeanager in Tokyo. And what they are experiencing now is their worst nightmare ever.
I have spent the past year closely seeing and cheering for diverse American students rising up against the absurdity, lies, and hypocrisy of this world filled with grownups’ greed. Those students are Arabs, Jews, South and East and West Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, etc. I have also seen many American citizens, especially Jews, rising up against the US support of the Israeli government because they don’t want their taxes to be used to kill Gazan children. What I see here are often not covered by the mainstream media or reported with mal-intentioned twists.
As I protested on the street and helped organizing a Palestine film series at a university where I teach, I learned so much from many people who have spent years and decades fighting for Palestine. I also watched many Palestine or Palestinian films. I thought I knew a bit, but realized I had no idea about the depth of Palestinian films. I was moved by those Palestinian filmmakers’ creativity, talent, and passion for storytelling. In terms of mass killing of civilians, we Japanese were once victims and perpetrators. How do the war which our parents and grandparents experienced and the material life which the Japanese enjoy today relate to the genocide in West Asia which we are witnessing today?
We will stream and screen 5-6 good Palestinian films that help us trace the history of Palestine as they let us feel the connection between us and the things unfolding there. We may want to avoid looking at it, but we know we should not, and if we really look at it straight, I believe we can connect and find our historicities in our own ways. More than anything, I hope you’d be surprised by the quality of those films as I did.
Besides Palestinian films, we will also stream/screen good films from China, India, Myanmar, etc, as well as Japanese shorts chosen from the call-for-entries. Drama, documentary, animation, SF documentary, experimental… you name it. We look forward to seeing you there!
https://www.instagram.com/unoportartfilms/
https://x.com/UnoPortArtFilms
https://www.facebook.com/UnoPortArtFilms
Poster art with watermelon and horizon themes : Ryuichi Akada
Website Design: Miyo Yanagawa
Co-founders: Reiko Tahara & Kozo Max Uesugi