Tokyo Movie Pageant: Julie Taymor to Head Jury

Veteran movie, theater and opera director Julie Taymor has been set because the president of the competitors jury at subsequent month’s Tokyo International Film Festival.

Taymor (“The Lion King”) will head a small group that selects the winners from the 15 competitors titles that unspool in Tokyo between Oct. 24 and Nov. 2, 2022. The opposite 4 members of the jury will probably be introduced later.

Taymor is the second lady to go the jury in as a few years and follows Isabelle Huppert in 2021. There was no competitors in 2020 as a consequence of COVID. And in 2019, the jury was headed by China’s Zhang Ziyi.

The Kurosawa Akira Award is to be revived after additionally being placed on hiatus since 2008. The award will probably be offered to a filmmaker who “is making extraordinary contributions to world cinema and is anticipated to assist outline the movie business’s future.” Earlier recipients have included Steven Spielberg, Yamada Yoji and Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

The recipient will probably be introduced at a later date. Along side the award, TIFF can even display screen world classics that Kurosawa Akira liked, together with Fitzcarraldo (1982, Werner Herzog) and The Spirit of the Beehive (1973, Víctor Erice), beneath the title of ” Kurosawa Akira’s Favourite Movies.”

“Ms. Taymor has directed not solely musical theater but additionally many wonderful movies. She has a very sturdy reference to Japan, having studied Ningyo Joruri conventional puppet theater right here as a pupil and later making use of it to her personal works. She can be an enormous fan of Kurosawa Akira and is the right match as jury president this yr, as we revive the Kurosawa Akira Award,” stated Ando Hiroyasu, pageant president. 

“The humanities are the beacon that brings us out of the chaos, main the way in which. In a darkened theater the photographs flickering earlier than us draw us each deeply into and likewise out of ourselves, our remoted and single selves. Maintain onto the movie theaters, the palaces that deliver us collectively to cross the boundaries of what we don’t know in any respect, what we predict we all know and what we’ve got personally skilled. Change into the lives and loves of others and allow them to encourage and torment you,” stated Taymor in a ready assertion.

The pageant’s full line-up will probably be introduced on Sept. 21.