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Founded in 1936, the Directors Guild of Japan recently bestowed its 60th New Directors Award on Teruya Toshiyuki for his family comedy “Born, Bone, Born.” Set in on an island near his native Okinawa, the film features an ancient local funeral custom: Washing the bones of the dead.

Better known to millions by his stage name Gori, Teruya belongs to the popular comedy duo Garage Sale, as well as being an in-demand actor. But he has also been directing short films for more than a decade.

At a Dgj symposium on Monday, on the margins of the Tokyo International Film Festival, Teruya joked with moderator Nakamura Yoshihiro, who had been on the award selection panel, about being the only one not to vote for his film. Nakamura countered that he hadn’t seen it at the time but, now that he had, “I’m happy with the result.” “Samurai Hustle” director...

You can read the interview in Japanese at the end of the article

Ryo Katayama was born in Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, in 1980. After graduating from college in 2003, Katayama​ started a career as an actor, mainly performing in independent films. In recent years, he starred in Yu Irie’s Memoirs of a Murderer (Jc 2017) and Masaharu Take’s The Ringside Story (2017) and played the lead in Motohiro Tajima’s Devote (2016). As a director, his short films received acclaim at numerous domestic film festivals, including the Special Jury Prize at Tachikawa Meigazadori Cinema Festival in 2018 for Meisoujyushi. Roar is his directorial debut feature.

On the occasion of Roar screening at Japan Cuts, we speak with him about his original style, loneliness, Fukui, the difficulty of Japanese people to express their feelings and many other topics.

Most family dramas that come out of Japan follow the style of Hirokazu Kore-eda. You did something different,...

Exclusive: CAA has signed Korean filmmaker Jung Byung-Gil for representation. He most recently directed the film The Villainess, which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. Deadline exclusively reported that the pic is being developed into a series by Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment at Amazon.

Formerly a stuntman, Jung made his directorial debut with the 2008 documentary Action Boy, where he followed students at the Seoul Action School as they trained to become stuntmen. His first feature film was 2012’s Confession of a Murder, which was remade into the 2017 Japanese-language hit Memoirs of a Murderer directed by Yu Irie. In 2018, Deadline also exclusively reported that he would direct the adaptation of the Red 5 comic Afterburn with Gerard Butler starring.

Jung remains managed by Spencer Baumgarten.

The official Japanese box office numbers for 2018 are not yet in –the Motion Picture Producers’ Association of Japan (Eiren) will announce them in late January – but preliminary figures don’t look great for the home team.

“Code Blue: The Movie,” a medical thriller based on a Fuji TV series, was the year’s highest-earning film at $83 million, according to the Private Life entertainment data and ranking site, but only three of the box office top ten were Japanese. The other two, “Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer,” at $82 million, and “Doraemon the Movie: Nobita’s Treasure Island,” at $48 million, were entries in long-running anime series.

A total of 29 Japanese films made JPY1 billion ($9.0 million) or more. This compares with 38 that passed the same milestone in 2017.

Faced with the prospect of more decline at home, as Japan’s aging population continues to trend down, the Japanese film industry is increasingly looking abroad...

It’s that time of the year and here at Asian Film Vault, we decided to have our first ever poll regarding the best films of the year. The votes were cast and counted and we came up with 18 films from 2017, that we consider the best of the year. And although Japan has the lion’s share in the list, we feel that we covered a large portion of Asia with our picks, since the titles include films from India, Thailand, Hong Kong, S. Korea, and Indonesia

Without further ado, here is the countdown.

(By clicking on the title of each movie, you can read the whole article)

Jagga Jasoos

As a musical with younger target audiences in mind, “Jagga Jasoos” lives up to the expectations and ends up as a visual treat through a brilliant performance of the protagonist. (Sankha Ray)

Kodoku Meatball Machine (Yoshihiro Nishimura,...

Screening at 2008’s New York Asian Film Festival and Fantasia Film Festival, Takeshi Miike’s ‘Sukiyaki Western Django’ is an homage to the great westerns of the 60’s. Using stylised set design and tributes to just about anything to come out of Japanese popular culture, we are taken on a journey to revisit the site where the Battle of Dannoura once took place and a fabled treasure still lives to this day.

In a once sleepy mountain town, chaos reigns as the Heike and Genji gangs face off on the search for a mysterious wealth of gold. A lone gunman enters town offering his services to the highest bidder out of the red and white clans, which spurs on the already boiling tension between these warring parties. We learn that the Genji’s hold a mysterious woman with a tormented past in their possession, who our gunman...

2017 saw a bit of a resurgence in Asian serial killer films. While South Korea gave us a mixed bag of films of the genre like “V.I.P.”, “Memoir of a Murderer” and “The Chase”, Japan remade the South Korean thriller “Confession of Murder” into “Memoirs of a Murderer” with disastrous results. But it was Chinese director Dong Yue’s solid debut effort “The Looming Storm” that managed to stand heads and shoulders over the rest. The noir film featured in competition at the Tokyo Film Festival and won Dong Yue the Best New Director award at the Asian Film Awards.

The Looming Storm is screening at the 17th New York Asian Film Festival

It’s 1997 and while the Handover of Hong Kong is happening in the south, elsewhere the Chinese government is shutting down non-profiting state-run factories. It is in one such rain-drenched factory-populated small town that Yu Guowei, a self-important Security chief at a factory,...

Exclusive: Original Film, G-base and Endurance Media are setting action director Jung Byung-gil to helm the Gerard Butler-starrer Afterburn. The film is eyeing a late summer production start from a script by Matt Johnson (Into The Blue). Jung made a splash at last Cannes with The Villainess, and before that Confession of a Murder, which was recently remade into the Japanese-language hit Memoirs of a Murderer. Neal Moritz and Toby Jaffe are producing through Original Film…...

Based on the Korean hit “Confessions of Murder”, Yu Irie’s edition of the film tries to place a great story in a Japanese setting, and manages to include even more twists than the original.

“Memoirs of a Murderer” is part of The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme

The film starts with a mysterious man announcing the publishing of the book that describes the crimes he committed 15 years ago, just after the stature of limitations expire. The repercussions of his action affect the whole of society, since the crimes were never solved, and the man retains a rather offensive attitude, describing his crimes in proud detail, and acting as star. The media are all over the case, while the families of the victims are enraged with him. Policeman Wataru Makimura, whose sister is considered a victim, despite the fact the her body was never found, and whose partner was killed by the man,...