There's No Place Like Home

Hello, all. I'm back once more in Canada (and very glad to be), and it has been an eventful past two weeks for me. The first one was spent at the 10th annual Nippon Connection film festival in Frankfurt, Germany, a great stretch of meeting awesome people and seeing many interesting, mostly good films. I have already covered two so far for the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow - Takuya Fukushima's unique science fiction-tinted love story Our Brief Eternity and Tomorowo Taguchi's coming of age film Oh, My Buddha! (also known as The Shikisoku Generation), both very good in their own ways. Check out the Pow-Wow for upcoming reviews from me, plus festival coverage and reviews from Chris MaGee, who was also present.

After Nippon Connection was over, many people unfortunately had to deal with flight delays due to the erupting volcano in Iceland - but not me. I instead hopped on a train to Paris to take in the sights and get some R&R for another week. Among the activities I occupied myself with was a visit to the Fondation Cartier building, which is currently hosting a rare exhibit of Japanese filmmaker"Beat" Takeshi Kitano's paintings and art pieces. You can read my report on the exhibit over at the Pow-Wow.

I'll be posting my many, many pictures from my adventures in the weeks to come in installments, so check back here to see 'em! In the meantime, I'll leave you with a bunch of goodies. Firstly, here are links to the blogs for some of the awesome people I met at Nippon Connection (also included in the "Favorite Links" sidebar):

Nishikata Film Review
SchönerDenken
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As you can see, one of them is the German film blog Schöner Denken. The fine gents who run it actually took some time during the fest to sit down with Chris MaGee and myself to talk a bit about Nippon Connection, the Pow-Wow and Japanese cinema in general. Check out the interview here!

Finally, here are some shots I took of the many very cool, very stylish posters for Nippon Connection that Chris and I found put up around Frankfurt.