Tokyo Film Festival Announces Sho Miyake & Fu Tien-yu As Recipients Of Kurosawa Akira Award

Tokyo International Film Festival has announced that Japanese filmmaker Sho Miyake and Taiwanese filmmaker Fu Tien-yu will be the joint recipients of the 2024 Kurosawa Akira Award.

The award honors the legacy and ongoing influence of the selected directors. Last year, China’s Gu Xiaogang and Indonesia’s Mouly Surya received the award. The selection committee for this year’s award included Yoji Yamada, Yoko Narahashi, Saburo Kawamoto and TIFF programming director Shozo Ichiyama.

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Sho’s credits include Playback (2012), which was selected for Locarno competition and won the Rising Director Grand Prix award at the  Takasaki Film Festival; And Your Bird Can Sing (2018); Small, Slow But Steady (2022) and All The Long Nights (2024), with the latter two films screening at Berlin.

Fu is a novelist turned filmmaker who made her directorial debut with Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, followed by My Egg Boy in 2016. In 2023, she directed her third feature film, Day Off, which was three years in the making.

Tokyo Film Festival is presenting several films which were favourites of Akira Kurosawa, whom the award is named after, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Time To Live, And The Time To Die and Kurosawa’s own Seven Samurai.

The festival also announced that Japanese actor and director Takumi Saitoh will head the jury for this year’s TIFF Ethical Film Award, which aims to raise awareness of social issues and understanding of diversity through film. Last year, 20000 Species Of Bees by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren won the award and was released throughout Japan.

In addition, the festival is again holding an International Symposium on Film Education, held last year as an extension of the TIFF Teens Film Workshop. Panellists from Palestine, Chile and Spain will discuss how film education contributes to society in the midst of social problems such as war, poverty, and refugees. The event will take place on November 2 at the National Film Archive of Japan.

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