Mizoguchi at 70 Years Gone, and 13 Films Back on Screen

The 39th Tokyo International Film Festival is building its cultural programming around a 13-film retrospective honoring Kenji Mizoguchi, timed to the 70th anniversary of his death. Alongside it: a symposium exploring a potential new international anime award, and a 10th-anniversary celebration of the festival's Teens Cinema Workshop.

Mizoguchi died in 1956, which makes the anniversary arithmetic unusually clean for a film festival — a round number and a director whose surviving reputation rests on a body of work rather than a single title. There's something satisfying about the pairing too: a retrospective of a filmmaker who worked in a studio system against a symposium asking whether animation deserves its own international prize. The festival is apparently still deciding.