The Nippon Connection

Every year the Nippon Connection festival takes over Frankfurt. The world’s largest festival dedicated to Japanese cinema—six days, over a hundred films, everything from documentaries to anime to features nobody’s heard of. Filmmakers from Japan come to talk about their work.

What matters about Japanese cinema is that it doesn’t rush you. There’s no compulsion to explain, to cut on the beat, to manipulate how you feel. You’ll watch an old man in a kitchen, a girl waiting on a train platform, a ghost in a library, and it hits harder than most Western films that cost ten times as much. It’s the refusal to look away from the quiet moments—that’s where the real power lives.

When the filmmakers are there talking about the work, something shifts. You understand what they were seeing when they shot it, what they were trying to hold onto, why the film had to exist exactly as it does. That context changes how you see the film when you watch it again on your own time.

I can’t make Frankfurt this year, but I think about what I’m missing. You clear your schedule. You sit in a dark theater with strangers and watch something that shifts how you see for a couple of hours. Then you eat and talk about it or you don’t. That’s the whole thing. That’s why it’s worth it.