Cannes Review: Chie Hayakawa’s ‘Plan 75’

The journey from page to screen for Pachinko began in 2017, on a plane ride from London to New York.

“Pachinko,” Apple TV’s sprawling historical epic adapted from Min Jin Lee’s acclaimed novel, has just wrapped up its first eight-episode season. An ambitious drama that spans four generations of a single family, the series examines the lives of the ethnic Koreans of Japan through the throes of heartache and perseverance.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentCharades has closed a raft of deals on “Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be,” an animated feature which world premiered at Cannes in the Special Screenings section and will go on to compete at Annecy festival. Directed by Benjamin Massoubre and Amandine Fredon, “Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be” is based on author René Goscinny and New Yorker cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé’s popular children books from the 1960’s which have been translated into than 30 languages.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief“Broker,” the unconventional family drama which appeared in competition at last month’s Cannes Film Festival, topped the box office in South Korea on Wednesday, its opening day.“Broker” grossed $1.10 million, enough to depose crime actioner “The Roundup” from the top spot that it had enjoyed for the past three weeks and which had made it the highest performing film this year.According to data from the Kobis tracking service operated by the Korean Film Council, “Broker” played on 1,590 screens and sold 145,000 tickets for Wednesday screenings. Its cumulative total of $1.15 million includes some $44,000 of previews earned on 14 screens.The feat by a local art-house film gives further support to the notion that cinema attendance is rebounding in Korea.

the 12-minute standing ovation the Broker cast received at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.The actress recently appeared on an episode of SBS Power FM’s Cine Town segment, where she spoke about what it was like to be part of the Broker cast at the annual film festival. “It felt so unreal,” Lee, who plays Detective Lee in the film, said of the experience, per SBS News.“I had a feeling that Song Kang-ho [who plays the character Sang-hyeon in Broker] would be named ‘Best Actor’ for his performance, so I kind of looked forward to that,” she added.

Tomris Laffly A gleaming and delightful anime with a large appetite for tenderness and laughter, director Ayumu Watanabe’s mother-daughter saga “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko” boundlessly adores its titular character even when it lingers a tad too long on her happy-go-lucky naiveté or ample love of food.We get introduced to Nikuko (Shinobu Ôtake), a charming thirtysomething living with her young daughter, Kikuko (Cocomi), as she contentedly works at a local grill house in a small port town in Northern Japan. Heavyset, carefree and irrepressibly joyful in a manner that both puzzles and disarms everyone around her, she is known as “the cheery plump lady who wound up living here” to townsfolk.

Broker and Decision to Leave have made history at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, marking the first time two Korean works have won at the same ceremony.The upcoming Korean films Broker and Decision To Leave have both taken home one award each at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, marking the first time two Korean films have won an award at the festival in the same year.South Korean actor Song Kang-ho, who rose to international prominence in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite in 2019, took home the Best Actor award for his role in Broker, which was directed by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. This makes Song the second Korean, after Jeon Do-yeon for 2007’s Secret Sunshine to win the award, and the first Korean male actor to do so.During his acceptance speech, the 55-year-old actor thanked director Hirokazu Kore-eda, along with his Broker co-stars Gang Dong-won, IU, Lee Joo-young and Bae Doo-na.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent“Plan 75,” Hayakawa Chie’s Japanese dystopian drama which world premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, has been sold in a raft of territories by Urban Sales. The movie is set in Japan, in a near future where a government program called Plan 75 encourages senior citizens to be voluntarily euthanized in order to remedy the aging society. The film weaves the stories of an elderly woman who isn’t able to live independently, a pragmatic Plan 75 salesman and a young Filipino caregiver.

Following the sparsely attended media conference for Close at Cannes this morning, journalists packed their way into the press room to hear Broker director Hirokazu Kore-Eda and cast, giving them a standing ovation.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefKore-eda Hirokazu, director of the well-received Cannes competition film “Broker” says his diverse and lonely characters constitute a family of choice.“This film tells the story of a family which came together by choice. Each character had been rejected. They set off on a car journey, as if by accident.

Broker, starring singer-actress IU, was given a 12-minute standing ovation at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.Broker, the first-ever Korean-language film by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, recently premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival on May 27. Once the screening had concluded, the fil received a 12-minute-long standing ovation from those in-attendance, according to a report from Korean news outlet Edaily.The publication also claimed that the standing ovation began with Cannes Film Festival’s executive director, Thierry Frémaux.

In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or winner “Shoplifters,” a group of small-time thieves forms their own makeshift family, living every day not only through pure survival instinct but a genuine love for each other. For his first film set in Korea, the Japanese filmmaker reflects on similar themes in “Broker,” a road trip odyssey reflecting on the family we choose and the family we tearfully let go of.

The Palme d’Or can be a blessing and curse, a gold-plated sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of filmmakers lucky enough to claim it. After the first waves of shock and joy recede, and their subsequent year-long victory lap reaches the finish line, those same filmmakers are left alone with one troubling thought: What’s next? Director Hirokazu Kore-eda offers a fine case study in how that question might trip someone up.

Esteemed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda walks a fine line between keen social observation and overt sentimental emotionalism in Cannes competition title Broker.

Naman Ramachandran The late Govindan Aravindan’s 1978 masterpiece “Thamp̄” (“The Circus Tent”) is one of two Indian films at this year’s Cannes Classics selection, alongside Satyajit Ray’s “Pratidwandi” (“The Adversary”) from 1970.“Thamp̄” was painstakingly restored by India’s Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), an organization founded by filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (“Celluloid Man,” “CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel”) in 2014. Dungarpur facilitated the restoration of Uday Shankar’s landmark film “Kalpana” (1948) by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the restored version of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefKawase Naomi, the Japanese auteur who won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and has had films in competition on multiple other occasions, is paying a flying visit to the festival with “Official Film of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games Side A,” which screens on Wednesday evening.A feature-length documentary, “Side A” is focused largely on the athletes. “Side B,” Kawase’s next project, casts a wider net and captures what Kawase calls a turning point for Japanese society.The International Olympic Committee hired me to do it. I was elected or nominated by the IOC.

While Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden dealt with a lot of sex and kink in its story of a handmaiden who gets into the good graces of her Japanese heiress, only to defraud her, the Korean filmmaker in his latest Decision to Leave, dotes on a detective Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il) who is head over heels with a very possible murder suspect, Seo-rae (Tang Wei).

South Korea may have made big inroads on American TV recently with “Squid Game” and “Pachinko,” and the country’s intriguing film and television industry also has a stronger-than-usual presence at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “Squid Game” star Lee Jung-jae’s political thriller “Hunt” premiered as a midnight screening early in the festival; Davy Chou’s “Return to Seoul” landed a pre-Cannes deal with Sony Pictures Classics and is one of the hits of the Un Certain Regard sidebar; and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is in the main competition with “Broker,” his first film shot in South Korea in the Korean language.

Olympics premiered on Monday, shown to reporters and other invited guests in the Japanese capital.The work of Japanese director Naomi Kawase, the 120-minute film looks at the Olympics primarily from the point of view of the athletes — but not just the winning athletes.After Tokyo, the film will be shown on Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival in the Bunuel Theater, named for Spanish-born iconoclastic filmmaker Luis Bunuel.“The Olympics are not just about getting prizes, being first and going after a victory that is right before you in the moment,” Kawase said in a recent interview. “I tried also to depict the pursuit of becoming winners in life.”Kawase has also made another film looking at events away from the athletes, which called “Side B.” It will debut in Japanese cinemas on June 24.

Shibari – it brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “all wrapped up in a neat little package!” because the one being tied is literally, just that!Except, we’re not talking about the end of a Simpsons episode – we’re talking about the intricate art of Japanese Rope Bondage, though technically, the correct term for the weaving of intricate knots for trussing and dangling people for erotic and sometimes artistic purposes would be Kinbaku. Eventually, the custom fell out of practice before reappearing in underground Japanese BDSM clubs. However, it’s only been since the early 1990s that Shibari has been gaining fans and popularity outside of Japan, popping up in clubs in Europe and America, naturally filtering out from there. Image: Sydney Rope ClubBut Shibari or Kinbaku isn’t your western style of Bondage, enjoyed in traditional BDSM settings, though the two practices share some similarities.