“I prepared this travel and was ready to go. But the current situation, regarding the pandemic and Corona, the Ukraine war, the long travel time ahead of 24 hours, and also the lack of physical strength to withstand it, this time, I had to give up going to Italy.” Takeshi Kitano will receive his Golden Mulberry Award for Lifetime Achievement in virtual form. The date of Friday the 29 th of April remains, of course, a historic one for the Far East Film Festival, and the programme for Kitano's Day remains unchanged: he'll be receiving his award in virtual form at 19.30 and the audience present will then participate in a screening of the immortal Sonatine.
A guest of honour like Takeshi Kitano is a dream come true for the FEFF and for all those moviegoers who love this legendary artist: the disciples of the noir Kitano, who discovered him through Violent Cop, the disciples of the romantic Kitano who discovered him through A Scene at the Sea, and those other disciples who have continued to discover him over the years...
It would be impossible to compress into a few lines the thrilling journey that is the life of Kitano. A journey between genres and styles and between cinema and television, but also between poetry and literature and between absolute masterpieces like Sonatine, Kids Return, Hana-bi (Golden Lion at Venice in 1997), Kikujiro, Dolls and Zatōichi (Venice Grand Jury Prize, 2003) and beloved hard-boiled cult movies like criminal saga Outrage. Without of course forgetting the brutal sergeant he plays alongside David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto in Nagisa Oshima's iconic Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, or his Hollywood incursions in Johnny Mnemonic and The Ghost in the Shell.
And obviously, this sixth, penultimate and, above all, historic day of FEFF 24 just keeps offering up the best of Asian cinema from morning to night: 10 titles in a line-up that includes aforementioned cult legend Sonatine and Citizen K (Yves Montmayeur's documentary about Kitano), ranging from the corrosive satire of Miki Satoshi's What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? to the world premiere of Kabir Bhatia's Malaysian horror The Devil's Deception.