Zipangu Fest To Open With Stunning Japanese Sound And Launch Party

A little update from our friends at the Zipangu Fest in the UK about their opening night and launch party on November 18th.  Remember that VCinema is media partners with the Zipangu Fest and, as such, will be providing podcast coverage of the festival.  Anyway, I will let the Zipangers take it away with their announcement:

A stunning new film that explores the relationship between ancient Buddhist rituals and sound will have its London premiere on the opening night of this year’s Zipangu Fest. Part of the festival’s Sounds of Zipangu strand, KanZeOn, which looks at religious traditions in locations far from Tokyo, will be screened at the ICA on November 18th, and followed by a launch party with musicians from Japan.

Sounds of Zipangu will also showcase the contemporary, urban side of sound and its perception, and We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…, a film documenting Japan’s avant-garde music scene and featuring Yoshihide Ohtomo and Hiromichi Sakamoto, will be screened at the ICA on November 20th.

Festival director and head programmer Jasper Sharp comments:  ‘Japan is world-renowned for its achievements in the field of avant-garde and experimental music, so we’re really excited to be showcasing films that reflect the very different sides of Japanese culture that have given birth to such movements – the ancient and traditional on the one hand, and the urban and the modern on the other. There’s also been a really exciting synergy between the country’s musicians and filmmakers in recent years, so with the broad array of titles presented under the Sounds of Zipangu banner, we aim to highlight the various ways in which the two arts feed into one another, and this I think will be strongly reflected in other aspects of our programming for this year too. This exciting collaboration for the Zipangu Fest launch party, with so many of the key figures involved in the KanZeOn project, is going to set the tone for the rest of the weekend perfectly.’

The second Zipangu Fest – celebrating the best of cutting edge and avant garde Japanese cinema – will be held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts from November 18th to 24th, before moving to venues around the UK. The festival will showcase a selection of Japan’s finest features, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental films.

Full details and descriptions of the films to be screened will be available soon at: http://zipangufest.com.