Sunday, August 31-------The Montreal World Film Festival is saluting the fine work done by the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, a Japanese organization that promotes both classic and contemporary Japanese films, by showcasing three classic Japanese films here. The Film Institute was founded by Madame Kashiko Kawakita to promote Japanese cinema abroad. The Institute's mission in the past 35 years has been to collect and protect films and other items of film heritage and to make them available to a worldwide public via touring programs and museum exhibitions.

This year, to honor the 100th birthday of Madame Kawakita, the Festival is presenting three films of iconic Japanese masters, including Akira Kurosawa (IKIRU, 1952), Nagisa Oshima (GISHIKI, 1971) and Shohei Imamura (VENGEANCE IS MINE, 1979). By collaborating with international film festivals around the world, the Film Institute is fulfilling its mission of bringing timeless Japanese classics to the attention of new generations of film goers.

But the focus on Japanese cinema is not only on films of the past. The Festival is presenting a host of new Japanese films in its various program sections. In the prestigious World Competition, two Japanese films are included in the roster. NOBODY TO WATCH OVER ME, which has its World Premiere today, is a crackerjack police thriller that has a contemporary slant of the intrusion of the internet on the investigation of the murder of two young girls by an adolescent boy. OKURIBITO (Departures) is a moody story of a former cellist who becomes a nokanshi, someone who prepares dead bodies for the next world.

Dreaming AwakeIn the First Films Competition, Japanese director Toshifumi Matsushita has created a compelling, naturalistic story of the struggles of a nomadic family living on the arid plains of Bolivia in PACHAMAMA. In the film DREAMING AWAKE, veteran artistic director Takeo Kimura helms his first feature film, a story of a devoted teacher and the wayward student he mentors. Other Japanese films making their mark at the Festival include: THE MAGIC HOUR, a comedy about a gangster who hires an out-of-work actor to play a hitman; CARRIED ON A SEA BREEZE, a humanistic drama about a man's return to his home town and his involvement with an old flame; ONE MILLION YEN GIRL, the story of a female drifter who unexpectedly finds love; AFTER SCHOOL, a thriller that brings a seedy private investigator into the murky underworld of the Japanese yakuza mafia; and YASHI, a beautifully shot co-production with Russia and Kazakhstan, about a young Muslim boy who flees from his native China who hooks up with young street hustlers on the streets of Kazakhstan.

The Montreal World Film Festival bows to the East to present some world cinema classics and a diverse crop of new Japanese talents to the world stage.

Sandy Mandelberger, Montreal FF Dailies Editor