Cinema Must Go On – The Ray of Hope Linking the Film Festivals of Every Country in the Calamity of COVID-19

The International Berlin Film Festival was boisterously festive with the induction of a new festival director and the establishment of a new category. When the curtain closed on the festival on March 1st, participants who were about to return home certainly did not think in the slightest it might be the last film festival of the year they would visit. Since March, film festivals in every country were faced with decisions of various types: cancelation, postponement, or switching to online among others; each expecting to come back stronger than ever. Under this state of affairs, the Sundance Film Festival set in motion the online film festival, We Are One: A Global Film Festival (*1) which brought together international film festivals from 21 countries around the world. In the sense film festivals jointly carried out a single screening event, We Are One was unprecedented and at the same time made apparent the shared sense of crisis among each festival that cinema would stop all together if they did not show films. Similarly, the most influential film festival in the world, the Cannes Film Festival, though forced to enact a pragmatic cancellation, still announced this year's selected films which was a manifestation of this sense of danger the global film cycle would be come to a standstill upon their own cancellation. That very Cannes Film Festival embracing the films of Kawase Naomi, Fukada Koji and Miyazaki Goro among the group of works they have placed hope as a driving force for global cinema must surely be a ray of hope shining onto this difficult period. Ms. Kawase Naomi, a Cannes Film Festival favorite; new star Mr. Fukuda Koji; and representing Japanese animation, Mr. Miyazaki Goro – the films (*2) of these three richly diverse directors will likely be etched deeply into history from a perspective incomparable to past films screened at Cannes.

*1 The Tokyo International Film Festival program selected for the We Are One: A Global Film Festival a short animation by Yuasa Masaaki, a focus on Fukada Koji and the feature-length films "Tremble All You Want" and "Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops."

*2 Cannes Film Festival 2020 Official Selections were Kawase Naomi's "True Mothers", Fukada Koji's "The Real Thing", and Miyazaki Goro's "Earwig and the Witch".