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.
– 『Someday, I Will Dump My Mother』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
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