JUNE 16: I AM A HERO – Movie Screening at TJFF

I AM A HERO – MOVIE SCREENING
Friday, June 16, 2017 @ 7:30PM
At The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, 6 Garamond Court
Tickets $12

Part of The Toronto Japanese Film Festival

The Beguiling and Page & Panel are proud once again to help support The Toronto Japanese Film Festival, presented by The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. This year, we will be the screening partners for I AM A HERO, based on the excellent manga by Kengo Hanazawa, currently being released by Dark Horse! The sole screening will take place Friday, June 16th, 2017, at 7:30pm. Tickets are now available!

The Toronto Japanese Film Festival is always filled with great films, many of them with their origins in popular manga. This year the two that really stand out to me are Midnight Diner, and This Corner of the World.

In Midnight Diner, four different but related short stories are told through visits to a small Japanese ‘diner’ and the somewhat mysterious cook and owner. I’ve had the pleasure of watching this one already and I liked it a lot, it was really well-crafted, and contemporary, and you could feel the depth of story that being adapted from manga brought to the page. This movie was also so successful in Japan that it has already spawned a sequel (maybe two!), and been continued on Netflix as Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, which you can watch even in Canada ;). Check it out.

I wanted to mention In This Corner of the World because it was also adapted from a bestselling manga by Fumiyo Kono, but also because of a connection it has to another important animated movie. In This Corner of the World is about a young woman in Kure, in the south of Japan, who is married to a Navy Officer in the Japanese military. Her life is radically changed when the war and the intense shelling and bombing comes to Kure. What you might not know is that the powerful Studio Ghibli film Grave of the Fireflies is also set in and around the Kure region of Japan, in roughly the same time period, and that will inevitibly make these two films interesting companions going forward. I’m looking forward to seeing In This Corner of the World a great deal now.

The full program for The Toronto Japanese Film Festival is online now at http://jccc.on.ca/tjff/films/, and we hope you get a chance to get out and see some great movies.

  • Chris @ The Beguiling