| 2011-12-07 | | | Thank you for joining YIDFF 2011!! |
We’ve come to the end of another YIDFF, and this year was a huge success!
While the effects of the March 11th disaster are still being felt keenly around Japan, we welcomed a total of over 23,000 festival-goers between October 6th to the 13th, recording our second largest attendance since the YIDFF began.
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who came from within Japan and abroad, as well as the many volunteers who lent their support.
The next YIDFF will be held in October 2013. We will announce the schedule of opening calls for YIDFF 2013 competitions immediately after it’s fixed.
| 2011-12-07 | | | Cinema with Us |
In March, as preparations for YIDFF 2011 were beginning in earnest, eastern Japan was struck by a terrible disaster. The damage was on a scale never experienced before and beyond our imagination, while the effects of the radiation released in the nuclear power plant accident have left uncertainty over our future, and the way we live our lives from now on remains in doubt.
Immediately after the disaster, we received support from many people that enabled us to hold film screenings and workshops for children to aid recovery efforts at evacuation centers and other venues in the affected areas. These activities were our way of taking our ideas about how we could help through the medium of film and translating them into action as best we could. Another activity is “Cinema with Us,” a screening project that began at YIDFF 2011 to assist recovery efforts in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake.
In the months following the earthquake, we assembled a program of 29 films that included shorts and feature-length works, and also held two symposiums, in order to use the venue for international interaction that is the YIDFF to show as many of the available films concerning the disaster as possible. Over 2,000 people participated in this program during the festival, and we are still receiving inquiries about it from far and wide.
In the near future, we will be holding screenings in Kobe, Kyoto, Tokyo, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima. This project, which continues to share various initiatives and observe the realities of how people are dealing with the aftermath of these unprecedented events, will no doubt be passed on in many ways from now on through various regions around the country. I feel that these overwhelming realities, the people who document and convey them, and those of us who share them with others, are all connected with the times we are experiencing. We hope that films that possess this connection will continue to be made, and we want to continue to view them!
(Takahashi Takuya, Yamagata Office / “Cinema with Us” Coordinator)