The highly anticipated Japanese Film Festival (JFF) 2025 returns to Singapore from 1 to 12 October, with screenings at Golden Village Suntec City and Oldham Theatre, offering audiences an expansive selection of Japanese films, old and new, over 19 titles across five distinct programme segments.
At its core, the Japanese Film Festival has always been an act of projection; of images, ideas, and emotions, from one culture to another, and from filmmaker to audience. Each year, we invite viewers to step into these projected worlds and make meaning through them.
This year, however, we bring that idea into sharper focus with the theme “Projection”, not just the casting of light onto a screen, but the intimate process of projecting ourselves onto what we see. It’s an invitation to consider how cinema becomes a mirror, a bridge, and a shared act of reflection.
This year’s festival Key Art encapsulates this delicate interplay of image and emotion. Set against the ethereal motif of Japanese paddy fields – long used in iconic films as reflective space for characters’ inner journeys – the visual suggests a quiet persistence in the act of seeking identity.
Interwoven with vivid Japanese maples, the design speaks to longevity as a quiet resistance; a gesture toward enduring beauty in an increasingly media-saturated landscape.
Festival Highlights
- Multiple Singapore Premieres across all segments
- Singapore Film Society will donate 30% of the ticket sales from The Cats of Gokogu Shrine to the Cat Welfare Society
- Post-screening Q&A with Director HAYAKAWA Chie (Renoir)
- Post-screening Q&A with Cinematographer URATA Hideho (A Girl Named Ann)
- Masterclass at JCC with Director HAYAKAWA Chie (Renoir) and Cinematographer URATA Hideho (Renoir, A Girl Named Ann)
- Renoir is a Singapore co-production, featuring cinematography by URATA Hideho
Programme Schedule
Tickets go on sale on 12 September 2025. For updates, programme details, and masterclass signups, visit: https://www.jff.sg
About The Opening Film, Renoir
Synopsis:
Suburban Tokyo, 1987. 11-year-old Fuki’s father, Keiji, is battling a terminal illness and is in and out of the hospital. Her mother, Utako, is constantly stressed out from caring for Keiji while holding down a full-time job.
Left alone with her rich imagination, Fuki becomes fascinated by telepathy and falls ever deeper into her own fantasy world…
Director of Renoir in Attendance for Post-Screening Q&A
HAYAKAWA Chie, Editor of Renoir
Born in Tokyo, she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her short film, Niagara (2014), was selected in the Cinéfondation section at the Cannes Film Festival 2014 and received awards in numerous international film festivals.
Her short film Plan 75 was the opening segment of the anthology feature Ten Years Japan (2018), executive-produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda. The short was expanded into her feature film debut, Plan 75, which was awarded the Camera d’Or Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival 2022.
She was also awarded Best Director at Thessaloniki and was awarded and nominated at numerous international film festivals.
Renoir marks Japanese writer-director HAYAKAWA Chie’s second film, following her feature directorial debut PLAN 75, which was selected in Un Certain Regard and awarded the Caméra d’Or Special Mention at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
Plan 75 screened at over 30 international film festivals and achieved sales to over 20 countries, from North America, across Europe, to Asia.
Opening Night, By Invite Only
Date: 1 Oct 2025 (Wed)
Time: 6:00pm (Screening of Renoir + 30mins Q&A with Director) Venue: Golden Village Vivocity
Second Screening, Open to the Public
Date: 3 Oct 2025 (Fri)
Time: 7.00pm (Screening of Renoir + 30mins Q&A with Director) Venue: Golden Village Suntec City
In Conversation: HAYAKAWA Chie & URATA Hideho
Join us for a rare double masterclass with two creative forces behind our Opening Film, Renoir.
About the masterclass:
Our 2 guests will be discussing their individual journeys before delving deeper into their collaborative process.
Moderated by JFF Programmer, Deepagcharan Chandran, the conversation will open with Cinematographer URATA’s sharing about his work on A Girl Named Ann and Renoir, both featured as part of the JFF 2025 Panorama section. He will focus on the visual language and his craftsmanship in realising the respective directors’ vision.
Director HAYAKAWA will be sharing her reflections on the journey from script to Cannes, through the lens of co-production, cross-cultural exchange, and cinematic language.
‘Renoir’ balances emotional fragility with visual restraint, and this conversation hopes to provide you with an exclusive, in-depth look.
A must-attend for filmmakers, cinephiles, and anyone interested in the craft of visual storytelling.
Date: 4 Oct 2025, 2.00 pm – 4.00 pm
Venue: Japan Creative Centre, 4 Nassim Rd, Singapore 258372 Admission: Free with registration
Admission: Free with registration at jffsg.peatix.com from 12 September 2025.
About URATA Hideho
Director of Photography based in Singapore, URATA Hideho, is an internationally active Director of Photography. He recently worked on Renoir (Cannes Film Festival, Main Competition), reuniting with director HAYAKAWA Chie after their collaboration on PLAN 75 (nominated for Best Cinematography, Asian Film Awards).
PROGRAMME SEGMENTS
PANORAMA
The Panorama section hopes to present a multitude of highly anticipated titles that have made waves across Japanese cinema over the past year, each offering a glimpse into contemporary storytelling shaped by humour, vulnerability, emotional distance, and cultural specificity.
All films in this segment will have their Singapore premieres, and together they create a vibrant landscape of narrative and stylistic diversity.
From tender coming-of-age tales to eccentric genre hybrids, this segment invites audiences to reflect on how we interpret what we see, how we project meaning onto images, and how those images in turn shape us.
Featured Titles:
-
Renoir
Opening this year’s festival is HAYAKAWA Chie’s intimate and ethereal sophomore film, a Singapore
co-production with Akanga Films that competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2025. Set in suburban Tokyo in 1987, the film follows 11-year-old Fuki, whose father is terminally ill and mother overwhelmed. Left to her imagination, Fuki begins exploring telepathy and the porous boundary between reality and inner world.
Why catch it: A poetic meditation on childhood, grief, and the inner sanctuaries we build to survive.
-
Cells at Work!
A highly entertaining and informative live-action adaptation of the best-selling manga, this film adopts a microscopic view of life inside the body. As the cells within teenage Niko fight to keep her alive – with humour, chaos, and over-the-top shenanigans – a subtle emotional thread emerges in the form of a father-daughter connection.
Why catch it: Wacky, clever, and surprisingly heartfelt, it’s educational fun with unexpected emotional bite.
-
ANGRY SQUAD: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers
A straight-laced tax officer becomes the unlikely ringleader of a ragtag team of loveable con artists as they work together to retrieve ¥1 billion from Japan’s most powerful tax evader. Directed by Shinichiro Ueda (One Cut of the Dead), this film meddles on the ground of deception and con with charm, wit, and impeccable timing.
Why catch it: A clever caper comedy with a heart, and a reminder to always pay your taxes.
-
6 Lying University Students
Six students, one job, and only one will be hired. A study circle formed to ace the final interview at an elite tech firm soon unravels into a psychological war of egos, secrets, and betrayal. Adapted from the hit novel by Akinari Asakura, the film plays with tension and performance in a tightly constructed ensemble drama.
Why catch it: A nerve-wracking chamber piece that turns a job interview into an emotional battlefield.
Teasing Master Takagi-san
A live-action continuation of the beloved television series and manga, which sold millions in Japan. Years after she left for Paris, Takagi-san returns to her hometown and reconnects with her former classmate Nishikata – the boy she used to tease. Their reunion is sweet, funny, and filled with unspoken feelings.
Why catch it: A romance built on time, teasing, and tenderness with a pinch of nostalgia for good measure.
-
366 DAYS
A melancholic romance that delves into missed opportunities, tracing the evolving relationships of three teens across years of love, separation, and rediscovery. Set against the music and memory of 2000s Okinawa, this is a film about what endures, and what might have been.
Why catch it: For fans of love stories with emotional depth, musical undercurrents, and aching silences.
Sunset Sunrise
Set in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, a salaryman flees the Tokyo rat race for a quiet fishing town still haunted by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
His presence unsettles the locals, but as they cautiously open their hearts, a new kind of community begins to form.
Why catch it: A soft, restorative tale of belonging, rooted in nature, memory, and quiet resilience.
-
A Girl Named Ann
Yu Irie’s latest feature, garnering glowing reviews, tells the powerful story of Ann, a girl forced into prostitution by her mother, now trying to find dignity and purpose through rehab, education, and kindness.
Featuring Yumi Kawai, winner of Best Actress at the 2025 Japanese Academy Awards (who also appears in Renoir), this is a film as devastating as it is quietly hopeful.
Why catch it: An unflinching yet compassionate portrait of trauma, resilience, and redemption.
-
Transcending Dimensions
Toshiaki Toyoda delivers a zany and highly idiosyncratic journey through religion, sorcery, and outer space, as a missing monk, an assassin, and a mysterious sorcerer clash in a spiritual duel across planets and timelines.
Why catch it: Like a cosmic fever dream; absurd, philosophical, and undeniably one-of-a-kind.
DOCUMENTARY VISION
This segment presents two luminous and deeply personal documentaries that explore how humans live in relationship with culture, nature, and the places they call home.
From the traditional lands of Hokkaido to the steps of a small coastal shrine in Ushimado, these films draw quiet power from the act of witnessing, illuminating everyday acts of care, resistance, and belonging.
Together, they offer a slow cinema of presence and patience, inviting audiences to reflect on what it means to tend to something, whether a community, a species, or a way of life.
Featured Titles:
-
The Cats of Gokogu Shrine
In the coastal town of Ushimado sits Gokogu, a modest, ancient Shinto shrine and unofficial sanctuary for stray cats. Some come to worship. Some to garden. Some just to sit in peace.
Others come only for the cats. Shot with his signature observational clarity, Kazuhiro Soda captures the rhythms of life surrounding this humble shrine, as volunteers, tourists, fishermen, and local children weave in and out of its orbit.
But beneath the surface serenity lies a quieter tension; not everyone welcomes the cats. Between joy and nuisance, reverence and resentment, Soda’s lens reveals a portrait of a community negotiating care, coexistence, and the limits of shared space.
Why catch it: A poetic, non-judgmental look at harmony, conflict, and the fragile ecosystems of everyday life.
30% of ticket sales from this title will be donated to the Cat Welfare Society.
-
Ainu Puri
In the northeastern region of Hokkaido, Shigeki Amanai lives by the rhythms of his ancestors. A salmon fisherman, a storyteller, and a father, he passes down the rituals and values of the Ainu, Japan’s Indigenous people, to his son, Motoki.
Intimately filmed across seasons and ceremonies, Ainu Puri documents a family’s quiet efforts to hold onto a culture long threatened with erasure; not through spectacle, but through simple acts: casting a net, lighting a fire, speaking a word in Ainu. This film is both a celebration and a quiet act of reclamation.
Why catch it: A rare and respectful glimpse into Ainu life, filled with quiet power and generational grace.
SHINJI SOMAI SHOWCASE
A quiet giant in the history of Japanese cinema, Shinji Somai is a filmmaker whose work continues to shape generations of storytellers. Known for his long takes, raw emotional cadence, and a deeply felt sensitivity to adolescence, Somai’s films chart interior landscapes with elegance and restraint.
Revered by directors like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, his legacy endures in the very grammar of Japanese arthouse film.
This year, JFF proudly presents three landmark works from Somai’s career, each one a testament to his signature approach: stories anchored in character, told through rhythm, distance, and movement.
Featured Titles:
-
Moving (1993)
When her parents separate, 12-year-old Renko is left alone with her mother in Kyoto. As her mother begins to reassert control over their new life, Renko makes quiet plans of her own, ensuring that whatever changes take place, they’ll happen on her terms.
Winner of Best Restored Film at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Moving is a deeply emotional portrait of growing up, not through melodrama, but through the quiet resistance of a child seeking autonomy in a world shaped by adult decisions.
Why catch it: Somai at his most restrained and revelatory, a child’s inner life rendered with astonishing clarity.
● The Friends (1994)
During the summer holidays, three boys spy on a reclusive old man, convinced he’s preparing to die. But as they inch closer, they uncover not a ghost, but an extraordinary life, and an unexpected friendship.
A gentle spiritual successor to Moving, The Friends captures the world through adolescent eyes: mischievous, curious, and quietly aching with empathy.
Why catch it: A wistful ode to boyhood, mortality, and the slow unravelling of assumptions.
-
Love Hotel (1985)
A tale of two broken souls – Yumi, a call-girl known as a “night-blooming flower,” and Tetsuro, a married man deep in debt to the yakuza. Their violent rendezvous in a love hotel is meant to be the end. But years later, they meet again, and return to the scene of that first macabre night, now hoping to finish what they started.
Shot under Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line and penned by Takashi Ishii, Love Hotel elevates erotic cinema into something brutal, lyrical, and hauntingly intimate.
Why catch it: Somai turns genre into poetry – a dark, stylish exploration of guilt, longing, and fate.
CLASSICS
Some films don’t just endure; they evolve, taking on new resonance with each passing generation.
This year’s Classics segment invites audiences to revisit three visionary works that redefined Japanese cinema, animation, and narrative form itself.
Whether through haunting stillness, philosophical inquiry, or elemental storytelling, these films continue to project themselves into the future, shaping how we see, think, and feel.
Anchored by a rare double bill of Mamoru Oshii’s most iconic animated films, alongside Akira Kurosawa’s immortal epic, this programme is a celebration of form, sound, and the mythic force of cinema.
Featured Titles:
-
Angel’s Egg (1985, 4K Restoration)
In a flooded, desolate city, a girl cradles a mysterious egg she believes to be sacred. A boy appears from a strange chariot, gun in hand, searching for a bird from his dreams. They circle one another wordlessly in a crumbling world that feels both ancient and unborn.
With minimal dialogue and maximal atmosphere, Angel’s Egg is a work of pure cinema: painterly, elliptical, and emotionally unfixed. Released 40 years ago, now newly restored in 4K, this cult classic remains one of Mamoru Oshii’s most enigmatic and haunting creations.
Why catch it: A meditative masterpiece on faith, memory, and fragility, as beautiful as it is unknowable.
-
GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995)
Set in the cybernetic near-future of 2029, a world where bodies are enhanced and minds networked, Major Motoko Kusanagi leads Section 9 in pursuit of a mysterious hacker called the Puppet Master. But as she descends deeper into the virtual, the lines between self, soul, and system begin to blur.
Based on the manga by SHIROW Masamune, Oshii’s cyberpunk landmark helped shape the language of science fiction worldwide, influencing everything from The Matrix to Westworld.
Why catch it: Still ahead of its time, a philosophical action film that asks what it means to be human.
-
SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)
A village under threat hires seven wandering swordsmen to protect them from marauding bandits. What begins as a simple rescue mission becomes a sweeping tale of honour, sacrifice, and the burdens of leadership.
Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai remains one of the most studied, referenced, and beloved films in the history of cinema. Every cut, every storm, every silhouette carries the weight of legend.
Why catch it: The original team-up movie. Kurosawa’s definitive epic of courage, class, and community.
TICKETS + INFO
Tickets go on sale on 12 September 2025. For updates, programme details, and masterclass signups, visit: https://www.jff.sg
SCREENINGS @GOLDEN VILLAGE
General Price: S$16.00
S$1.50 off for Friends of Japan Creative Centre, Singapore Film Society, Asian Film Archive, and GV Movie Club members
Terms and Conditions
- Present SFS membership, Friends of JCC Mailer, AFA Membership, or GV Movie Club Membership at the box office to purchase a maximum of 4 discounted tickets per session.
- SFS Members, Friends of JCC, AFA Members, and GV Movie Club Members can also use ePromo code online to purchase a maximum of 4 discounted tickets per session.
- Discount cannot be used in conjunction with other promotions, offers, or discounts.
- The Organisers and Golden Village reserve the right to amend these T&Cs without prior notice.
SCREENINGS @OLDHAM THEATRE
https://www.asianfilmarchive.org/
General Price: $10
Concession: $9
Friends of Japan Creative Centre, Singapore Film Society, and Asian Film Archive members: $8.50
Terms and Conditions
- Concession tickets apply to Students (Local & Overseas), Full-time National Servicemen (NSF), and Senior Citizens (55 years and above) only.
- Please check film ratings before purchasing tickets. Please note that you may be asked to present your ID at the door (this applies to concession tickets as well). Only physical photographic identification is allowed; digital copies of identification are not allowed. AFA reserves the right to turn away any members of the public without physical photographic identification.
- Upon confirmation of your order for Tickets, no exchange of Tickets will be made under any circumstances, and Tickets are not transferable. No refund on Tickets will be made under any circumstances except due to cancellation of the event. The resale of Tickets at any price is prohibited.
JFF 2025 Opening Night is by Invitation Only, except for SFS Members who can claim a free ticket while tickets last. Anyone can sign up to be an SFS Member here: https://www.singaporefilmsociety.com/membership
For more information on the latest programme updates, please visit: https://www.jff.sg/
Facebook: japanesefilmfestivalSG
Instagram: japanesefilmfestivalsg
Official Hashtag: #JFFSG2025
More from Wake Up Singapore:-
‘To Be Seen’: Mental Health Film Festival Singapore Seeks Films That Turn Struggles Into Stories
SEC Environmental Film Festival to Inspire Action and Spark Change
If you have a story or a tip-off, email admin@wakeup.sg or get in touch via Whatsapp at 8882 5913.
Interested in advertising on our media channels? Reach out to us at admin@wakeup.sg!
Since you have made it to the end of the article, follow Wake Up Singapore on Telegram and X!
Wake Up Singapore is a volunteer-run site that covers alternative views in Singapore. If you want to volunteer with us, sign up here!
If you can, please do consider buying a mug or two to support Wake Up Singapore’s work!
