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 request to geo-block the online screenings to Japan only. Many of them may be available in your countries -Please check them out!
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Poster art: Ryuichi Akada
Website Design: Miyo Yanagawa
Co-Directors: Reiko Tahara & Kozo Max Uesugi