The Japan Foundation Center for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam will host a Japanese Film Festival 2011 themed ‘Love’ in Hanoi from October 20 to 26 and Danang from November 11-13.

The festival will feature eight movies related to love and will present the way Japanese people express their feelings and Japanese culture. The films will have both English and Vietnamese subtitles. Love is universal but the ways of expressing love vary in cultures and individuals.

If the film Paradise Kiss (2011) depicts a gradual development of love between a handsome fashion design student and a high school girl, the action movie Kamui (2009) focuses on love for freedom.

Both films star the most in-demand talents, Osamu Mukai & Keiko Kitagawa, Kenichi Matsuyama (Norwegian Wood by Tran Anh Hung) and Koyuki (The Last Samurai), respectively, but the differing expressions of love are completely different in both movies.

In the film The Milkwoman (2004), an unmarried 50 year old woman still holds onto her feelings for her first love from high school and we see some unexpected turn of events after a chance encounter with the man, who is now a married, middle-aged civil servant.

A Stranger of Mine (2004), on the other hand, comically depicts love at first sight when a businessman falls in love with a stranger.

Meanwhile, The Twilight Samurai, directed by Yoji Yamada, follows Seibei Iguchi, a low-ranking samurai, who leads a life without glory as a bureaucrat in the mid-XIX century Japan (Edo period (1600-1867).

Tickets are free and available at Japan Foundation Center for Cultural Exchange in Vietnam (27 Quang Trung, Hoan Kiem, Hanoi), Le Do Cinema (46 Tran Phu Street, Hai Chau, Danang) and Film Distribution and Cinema Center (68 Tran Phu Street, Hai Chau, Danang).

SGT