Interview: Susan Bui on the Japanese Film Festival
In anticipation of the Japanese Film Festival happening across Australia on the 28th Oct to 5th Dec, Addy Fong spoke to Susan Bui, a programmer for the festival, about this year’s program and her experiences being a young Asian-Australian creative in Australia:
Hi Susan, I’m a little nervous, you’re the first interview I’ve done in a while. I was hoping we can be friends. I thought we’d connect because we’re both young Sydney based Asian-Australian creatives, but I wasn’t sure [nervous laugh]
[laughs] Of course, we can be friends, I’d love that. Hopefully we can grab a drink and catch-up once lockdown ends.
Awesome I’d love that! I’m from Blacktown. Where are you based?
I’m based in Marrickville.
You’re in Marrickville in Sydney’s Inner-West, I feel like that suburb is full of young creatives. That said, I was looking at your name and trying to figure out whether you’re Japanese or…
I’m Viet [laughs]
As both first-generation Asian-Australians, we look generally ‘Asian’ and speak in Australian accents. We often face this crisis of identity and get stereotyped based on appearance. The added complexity you have is that you’re a Vietnamese-Australian programmer for the Japanese Film Festival. Does this inform the films you choose?
I had a strong interest in Japanese culture ever since I was in high school and all through uni. After uni I moved to Japan for a few years, I didn’t think I was going to get culture shock by moving to an Asian country because I thought, all Asian cultures must be kind of similar.
When you look at Chinese and Vietnamese cultures, the way the two cultures communicate is quite similar but when I moved to Japan, it was completely different and I didn’t expect to be as shocked as I was, but it really does inform how I view Japanese culture now and how I critique Japanese films having understood, having lived there, and having received cultural treatment that way. It’s interesting being someone who’s not of Japanese culture programming Japanese films, because I feel like generally, being Western born first-generation Australian, I feel like, at least for myself, there is a desire to learn about Eastern culture. There’s only so much I know about my own culture and Vietnamese culture hasn’t been as accessible as Japanese culture has. So perhaps that was one of the reasons why it was easier for me to latch on to Japanese culture because it’s so accessible, there’s so much of it available for free.
In our Australian programming team, there’s only one person that’s Japanese, the rest of us are of Italian, Vietnamese, Laos, Jewish-Eastern European descent. I think it works to the advantage of the Japanese Film Festival because we’re trying to highlight these other aspects that we see from reviewing films that other people can’t see because they can’t access it. I feel like sometimes if you are a particular culture, for example if you’re Japanese, there are some things that you’re desensitized to, and you don’t think that’s an important aspect of your culture that you want to highlight. As an outsider it’s more interesting because we don’t know that much information about it so therefore, we want to pull it out for other people to learn as well.
I did a bit of stalking of your LinkedIn and Insta and I’m impressed! You’re a programmer for the film festival, a practicing artist, a sculptor, photographer, and videographer. Does this inform the types of films you select?
Oh, it’s all curation on social media [Laughs] So, as you’ve probably as you’ve stalked, I have a fine arts background. Having a fine arts background in photography, I spent more time doing video related stuff and ceramic stuff. Maybe not the practice so much like the physical practice, but fine arts is really philosophy heavy. I think because it is philosophy heavy, sometimes, it can be hard, but it informs the types of films and topics that I’m interested in. When choosing films for the film festival, funnily enough, I need to be quite mindful of the types of films that we choose, what I’m interested in isn’t necessarily what our demographic are interested in. I’m quite lucky, my predecessors started to keep an archive, measure, and do research on the type of demographics we have. I feel like having a background in film and photography has been helpful. I think it’s better if you have a film programming team that’s a little bit more diverse, that we don’t all come from a creative arts background. Some films that I’ve chosen in the past I’ve thought have been great films but have been absolute flops in the festival because they don’t resonate with everyone.
If that’s the case is better to choose content that you enjoy or that’s going to sell?
It’s a mixture of both. There must be a balance between choosing films for your film festival demographic and choosing films that you really like. Obviously, it’s easier to do anything if you there is something that you like about it. I just think that this year in general, it has been a weak year for cinema coming out of Japan. My favourite film is Under the Open Sky. When you really like a film it’s easy to sell it because you can authentically sell it. We’re lucky cause our demographic is young with general audiences between 25 and 34. I think it’s because people love Japanese culture so much and young people love Japanese culture, animation, and manga, and that all ties in with the festival.
Can you talk about the categories or themes for this year’s festival were chosen?
This year I think programming has been particularly hard because of the COVID pandemic. Basically 2020 was a dead year, not many film productions were making films, they were all put on hold and films that were meant to be released are getting releases now. It’s almost like we missed a year of films we could have chosen from because of the pandemic. Generally, the way that we program is we contact every single distributor in Japan, and we ask them to send the films that are available and the films that are coming up. We also do our own research through the internet and see what other films are available by international filmmakers that are working with Japanese actors or are cross-cultural film productions and we try to get those films as well. It’s a process of elimination, we can review the films and then from there, we draw out the themes.
Funnily enough, there was so many films this year about loss, someone dying, someone losing their mother or overcoming of obstacles that the theme of resilience came about. This is really fitting with the current climate that we’re living in, because we’ve all had to endure the pandemic, globally. Somehow the films that have been programmed also represent this kind of striving for a better good or making connections with lost time and lost people. 2019 was the same, we looked at the relationships between the films and it was a brand-new programming team for us. We took that into consideration as a fresh team of people are curating a fresh program. I’d say like on average, our programming team changes about every three years. It’s just the nature of I think young people.
The JFF programming team is quite young! How long does the festival usually take to organise?
Yeah, we’re all in our mid to late 20s and early 30s. We’re just a team of four and a half people, five people, we hire one person for the film festival period. We’re run by a non-for-profit organization that does other things, so our core team is only four people. For the type of film festival that we run, it should be a dedicated team, but we run other projects. We start kind of in February, but we really start in April. From April we try to lock our program in, we lock in the special series first, because it’s generally the easiest to lock in. By August, ideally by the end of July, we’ve locked in the latest releases program. We do most of our synopsis writing in-house and that takes up a lot of our time as well. We do a lot of stuff in house.
You don’t grab your synopsis from press kits?
We ask for press kits but unfortunately the Japanese film industry is really geared towards Japan only. Often, they don’t make kits available in good English. There are issues with translation, so it usually means that we need to write the synopsis. A good film synopsis will sell films. One of the good things about writing synopsis is you start to understand the film better. I don’t particularly mind writing film synopsis, it’s not my strong point but it’s fine.
Can you talk about the Japanese Film Festival’s classics program?
The classics program is curated by us, it’s a venue hire, and we try to work with the cultural institutions across the country to deliver that program. The main reason why we used the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the past was because they had 35mm and 16 mm film projectors. The classics program is now a special series, the films are free because they’re mostly funded by our headquarters. It is really a special program because the films come from our headquarters archive. It’s this initiative that they started so more people could have access to this array of prints, like really, rare prints. These days, because the prints are so old, when we’re programming each special series or classics theme, it’s the opposite to how we do latest releases, we try to think of a theme or a director that we want to focus on first, and then source the films that way. I think it’s just because of the nature of the actual material. When we put that together if there are any specific films that really inform the program that aren’t available in print from our archive then we try to source it around the world or try to get the DCP, the digital version of it, but sometimes we’re unsuccessful.
Looking at the Manga Adaptations selection, do films that are visually bright, colourful, and action paced sell better and have a higher chance of distribution?
It depends really, in the manga adaptations selection, none of these films are going to have a theatrical release in Australia. If we’re lucky we might get Tokyo Revengers. There are a really limited number of distributors in Australia to begin with and some of the films are owned by big Japanese companies who sell films specifically for the Japanese demographic, so the Japanese market only. Due to its recent popularity with the anime series Tokyo Revengers might get a release in Australia. A lot of people I know have been watching the anime and they’re excited to see the film at the festival.
What would you say to encourage young creatives reluctant to attend a film festival? I guess one barrier could be accessibility.
I think these days the accessibility thing is going to become less of a barrier because film festivals are going online. Most film festivals these days will start to offer an online aspect of their festival. The good thing about going to a film festival and watching films is it can only make you a better filmmaker or a better person at critiquing films because every film is different even though so many stories are the same. People have written about the same story hundreds of times but they’re all different. I think it’s important to see what films are coming out because film as well as art, fine arts, critiques what’s happening in society at that time. You can really get an understanding of the director’s intentions, their themes. If you start watching films by the same director, you’ll see what their passion is and how they portray that through film. I think it’s important if you’re a filmmaker or you work in culture to absorb a much information as you can, if you’re an artist go to as many galleries as you can, read as much as you can on other artists, see what other film festivals are doing, research directors and filmmakers that might not be coming to Australia. It’s good to have a broad understanding and it also lets you know where you stand and how your opinions stand against other people. With the films that come to film festivals, I’d say at least 60% of them don’t get a theatrical release in Australia so if you miss your chance to watch it at the film festival, you probably won’t get another chance to watch it in your country on the big screen. I don’t think the cinema will ever die completely and I don’t think the film festivals will die completely because the cinema experience is a special experience. Basically, you go into a dark room, and you laugh and cry with strangers that’s an experience. There are obviously accessibility reasons and because we had the pandemic, I think it really highlighted the fact that film festivals are a privilege for people who live within proximity or people who have the money to attend a festival. If you can offer an element of the festival or films that aren’t going to get a theatrical release in Australia online, that’s a great thing to do. The good thing is with an online component is it means that anyone in Australia can attend the festival virtually, they don’t have to be just in Sydney or just in Melbourne. Overall, I think it’s a great thing if film festivals adopt this virtual and non-virtual format. If it was just online, I think you lose that spark and that specialness of it.
Would the festival consider heading out to places like regional or Western Sydney?
In the past, we did some screenings and Parramatta or Burwood. I think because the team is so small it’s hard to do that, but we have a regional program which is called the Satellite program where we work with co-organizers around regional areas of Australia and bring free film screenings to their cities. Not just with our film festival but also with our arts and culture programming, like our exhibitions, we understand that we are situated in the city. Obviously, there’s a particular demographic that attend our events and we’ve tried in the past to collaborate with cultural institutions. For example, before it (COVID-19) happened, I did a public program for one of our exhibitions, I collaborated with Campbelltown Arts Centre to bring some of the program there and then the pandemic happened. We have touring exhibitions; we try to tour to regional parts of other areas of Australia. I invited a Japanese wagashi artist from Japan to come and do a demonstration on how to make wagashi and the history behind it and why it’s so significant in Japanese culture and relating to tea ceremony and then it just died. There have been talks about trying to do an outdoor cinema, like a screening or something but we just don’t have enough people. We’re already stretched so thin.
Top 5 films people should see at the festival:
- Under the Open Sky – a serious drama that looks at a man who’s been in jail for 13 years and he’s trying to find his lost mother and assimilate back into society. The main character is played by Kōji Yakusho and he’s one of my favourite Japanese actors.
- Hokusai – our opening film about the famous painter Hokusai who did the great Kanagawa wave, he’s most famous for that. It’s a biopic about him as a struggling artist, trying to get to where he is and shows him in four progressions of life.
- Poupelle of Chimney Town – It’s a cute animation. It’s about this little boy who dreams of seeing the stars. They live in this smog-ridden town and he meets this rubbish boy and everyone doesn’t believe in him and then he goes on this adventure to find the stars.
- Last of the Wolves – My personal top favourite, it’s a hardcore Yakuza film and it’s gory and action-packed if you like that type of film. These are the types of films that I like now after having watched so many slow-burn Japanese films.
- Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist, a documentary on the animator Satoshi Kon, who did the film Paprika. The French director Pascal-Alex Vincent interviewed a lot of Satoshi Kon’s people in the industry and people who are close to him. This one, although not technically a Japanese film, is quite well-rounded.
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For more information about the Japanese Film Festival, go here.
Interview by Addy Fong.
