The Films I Didn’t See

Nippon Connection in Frankfurt is the largest festival for Japanese film in the world, which sounds like press copy until you actually look at the program. Over six days: more than a hundred features and shorts, spanning independent work and blockbusters, anime and documentary, with filmmakers flying in from Japan to present their own films in person. It’s the kind of event where you could spend the whole week inside a cinema and feel like you’d used time correctly.

I didn’t make it that year. The lineup included The Hungry Lion, Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops, Mary and the Witch’s Flower, Bamy, Moon and Thunder, The Boy and the Beast, Mutafukaz, Pumpkin and Mayonnaise, River’s Edge, and Lu Over the Wall—titles that range from lyrical to blunt to genuinely strange, which is roughly the bandwidth I want from any festival worth crossing a country for.

There’s something about seeing Japanese cinema communally that watching at home can’t replicate. The silence after a difficult scene reads differently when strangers are sharing it. Frankfurt might seem like an odd home for this, but Nippon Connection has been running long enough to have earned its place on the map. It comes back every year. One of these years I’ll actually be there.