Shinagawa Hiroshi to Direct Japan-U.S. Zombie Mockumentary Film ‘Among the Dead’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Anna Marie de la Fuente In one of the first deals to emerge from the San Sebastian Film Festival, powerhouse indie studio, Filmax, which celebrates its 70th anniversary at San Sebastian Festival, has snapped up international rights to LGBTQ+ dramedy “Norbert(a)” from Imposible Films, the producers of hits “Truman,” “The People Upstairs” and “Stories not to be Told.” Directed by newcomers Sonia Escolano, who also penned the script, and Belén López Albert, it is toplined by Luis Bermejo (“Magical Girl”), Adriana Ozores (“Alba”), Mariona Terés (“The Girls at the Back”) and María Romanillos. Norbert(a) follows Norberto and María, who’ve been married for decades and live what seems like an ordinary life in their working-class neighborhood.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Studio Ghibli, the iconic Japanese cartoon firm behind Miyazaki Hayao’s recent “The Boy and the Heron” is selling a controlling stake to Japanese broadcaster NTV.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Director Clara Law (“The Goddess of 1967”) has been set as president of the jury which will discern this year’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards. She will be joined by Malaysia’s Yeo Yann Yann (“Ilo Ilo,” “Wet Season,” American Born Chinese”), German producer Anna Katchko (“Stepne,” “Happiness”), and Faisal Baltyuor, producer and CEO of Muvi Studios in Saudi Arabia. A separate jury for documentaries and animation will be headed by Taiwan-based Myanmar director Midi Z, India’s Rima Das and Japanese documentary maker Toda Hikaru. The APSAs will be presented at a ceremony in Gold Coast, Queensland on Nov.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Disney has given a green light to a second season of Japanese drama -horror series “Gannibal.” Set in a fictional Japanese village, season one of Gannibal saw recently relocated police officer Agawa Daigo arrive in his new home a broken man. Wrestling with his guilt over an event that traumatized his daughter, things started off promisingly for the new arrival before a series of alarming events quickly led Agawa to the horrifying realization that something was deeply wrong with the villagers and the mysterious Goto family.

Marvel Studios, over the course of its decade-plus history, has become a premier place for newer/indie directing talent looking to break into big-budget studio filmmaking. We saw this with folks like the Russo Brothers, James Gunn, Destin Daniel Cretton, and many more.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Ozu Yasujiro, the leading Japanese film director behind classics including “Tokyo Story” and “Late Spring,” has had his double birth and death anniversaries – Ozu died in 1963 on the day of his 60th birthday, a little more than a year after the release of his last film “An Autumn Afternoon” – celebrated throughout 2023 at places as varied as the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles’ Margaret Herrick Library and the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute. But it falls to October’s Tokyo International Film Festival to put on this year’s biggest and most comprehensive reconstruction of Ozu’s surprisingly varied career. Working in conjunction with the National Film Archive of Japan, the festival will present an extensive retrospective that covers almost all the films that Ozu directed (TIFF/NFAJ Classics: Ozu Yasujiro Week) from Oct. 24-29. Ozu spent his entire career, from camera assistant in 1923 to renown director in 1962, as an employee of major Japanese studio Shochiku, with all the advantages and disadvantages such an arrangement brought. While Ozu is best known for his stripped-down dramas, often centered on family relationships, sometimes troubled or contentious, involving parents and young or grown-up children, many hinging on questions of marriage, generational misunderstandings or the loneliness of the elderly, the director’s register may not entirely have been of his own choosing. “The apparent consistency of the post-war films surely owes as much to this production situation as to Ozu’s aesthetic choices,” wrote critic Tony Rayns in a recent Sight & Sound portrait.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Steven Yeun has bucked stereotypes and carved a new niche as sexy Asian leading man with his roles in “Burning” and “Beef.” Justin Chon transitioned from a supporting role in “Twilight” to directing “Gook,” “Jamojaya” and half of Apple TV+’s “Pachinko.” And Busan-born Daniel Dae Kim has expanded from “Lost” and “Hawaii” to becoming one of Hollywood’s leading producers. The stateside successes of Korean-born and Korean American talent are growing and are worth celebrating. But the Busan International Film Festival’s planned party is being dialed down a notch under the impact of the twin writers’ and SAG Actors strikes in the U.S. Busan’s ‘Special Program in Focus: Korean Diasporic Cinema’ will go ahead with a screening schedule including six films, public talk sessions that include Oscar-winning actor Youn Yuh-jung, Lee Isaac Chung, director of Oscar-winning film “Minari,” and John Cho, the Seoul-born “Star Trek” and “Searching” star.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Paramount+ streaming service will launch in Japan in December as a free-of-charge addition to cable and internet provider J:COM’s platform and to pay-TV service Wowow. Paramount+ originals including “Tulsa King,” “Mayor of Kingstown” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” will be available at the launch of the service and for the first time in Japan. Japan will be the second country in East Asia where the service becomes available, following a launch in South Korea in June last year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Japan’s Dean Fujioka (“Fullmetal Alchemist,” “The Man From The Sea”) and the U.K.’s Callum Woodhouse (“All Creatures Great and Small,” “The Durrells”) are set to star in “Orang Ikan,” a WWII-set creature horror film. The picture is scripted by Singapore and Indonesia-based Mike Wiluan (“Buffalo Boys,” HBO series “Grisse”) who will also direct the picture from next month. International rights to “Orang Ikan” have been picked up by London-based SC Films International, which will give the project its sales launch at the Busan festival and accompanying market next month. Set in the Pacific, 1942, a Japanese ship transports prisoners of war to occupied territories as slave labor.

Naman Ramachandran Indian star Karthik Sivakumar, known by his screen name Karthi, is bullish about upcoming release “Japan,” his 25th film. The film is due to release in November during the Deepavali holiday frame in Tamil, Telugu and a few other languages.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Korean crime-action webtoon “Knuckle Girl” is being adapted as an original film production for Amazon’s Prime Video. It is structured as a Korea-Japan co-venture. The narrative revolves around a promising woman boxer, Ran, who takes on school bullies and participates in illegal bouts.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Tabu-starring spy thriller, “Khufiya” has been set as the opening title of the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (Oct. 11-15).

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent U.S. director Darren Lynn Bousman’s English and Arabic-language horror film “The Cello,” starring Jeremy Irons and “Saw” star Tobin Bell, is set to open theatrically across Saudi Arabia on Thursday, marking a significant moment in the kingdom’s moviemaking ambitions. The high-end chiller, about a cellist who finds out his new instrument comes with a centuries-old curse, is generating local buzz and robust ticket pre-sales following its gala premiere on Sept.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Johnny and Associates, the high-profile Japanese talent agency whose deceased founder and long-time president Johnny Kitagawa has been revealed as a serial sexual abuser, will forgo some of its fee income as a step toward victim compensation. The move appears to be an attempt to lessen the company’s toxic brand following the now-confirmed revelations about the late Kitagawa’s predatory behavior.

Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah were the directors behind Batgirl, the DC film at Warner Bros. with Leslie Grace in the titled role. The superhero movie would end up being axed by the studio and with the release of The Flash earlier this year, the filmmakers are reflecting on their film.

William Earl Nicolas Cage is one of the most admired actors in the world, and given the lore surrounding his unique personality and spectrum of roles, ranging from award-winning to eccentric, he’s always a point of interest in Hollywood. In the upcoming film “The Retirement Plan,” debuting theatrically on Sept. 15, Cage plays a retired government assassin with a violent set of skills, who must protect his estranged daughter and grandchild (played by Ashley Greene and Thalia Campbell) after they get tangled up with some very bad men (including Ron Perlman and Jackie Earle Haley).

Liam Neeson’s new action thriller Retribution has been described as in the running for “worst film of the year” by critics.Directed by Nimród Antal (Predators), the film follows financier Matt Turner (Neeson) who is threatened by a mysterious bomber while driving his son and daughter to school. Other cast members include Noma Dumezweni, Lilly Aspell and Jack Champion.It’s the third remake of the 2015 Spanish film The Stranger, following German and Korean adaptations in 2018 and 2021 respectively.Retribution, which was released in the US on August 25, received a negative review on Rolling Stone, who described it as a “formula beaten into submission”.“Retribution is not the worst of his thrillers/action movies – that honour belongs to either last year’s god-awful Blacklight or this freezer-burned turkey – but it does suggest that Neeson may want to consider retiring from the everyman action-hero beat for good,” the review reads.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Japan has unveiled details of a location production incentive scheme that it hopes will attract more film and TV shoots to the island nation. The scheme offers reimbursement of up to 50% of qualifying expenditure in Japan, with an upper limit of JPY1 billion ($6.4 million) on the disbursement. The scheme is the product of the Ministry of Economy, Trade Industry and two agencies, the Visual Industry Promotion Organization, described as the program operator, and the Japan Film Commission, described as the program coordinator. The scheme is open to “large-scale international film and television projects.” These must have either minimum direct production spending in Japan of $3.2 million or, in the case of projects distributed in ten or more countries, have Japanese production spend higher than $1.1 million. Additionally, all projects must fulfil four other criteria: benefit to the Japanese content industry through employment or use of studios; shoot in Japan; promote the location where the filming took place; help the global appeal of Japanese works. Significantly, the guidelines make no reference to the eligibility of post-production or visual effects work conducted in Japan.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Yakusho Koji, the Japanese star who was named best actor at Cannes this year in Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days,” is set as the subject of a seven-title showcase at the upcoming Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan. Among the septet are classic erotic film “Lost Paradise” from 1997, this year’s “Perfect Days” and 1996 film “Shall We Dance,” which was later remade in Hollywood. A former civil servant who first ventured into Taiga drama (long-running TV series broadcast by NHK), then played in several films by Kurosawa Akira, Yakusho became a major 1990s star in Asia as a result of “Shall We Dance?,” in which he portrayed a ball room dancer, and “Lost Paradise.” He also starred in Itami Juzo’s “Tampopo.” Directed by Morita Yoshimitsu, “Lost Paradise” is a tale of a man and a woman whose marriages no longer make them happy, but who rediscover desire in each other’s arms. Fatefully, however, their newfound joy means ever greater transgression of Japan’s strict morality laws. At the time of the release of “Lost Paradise,” the producers deliberately darkened the erotic scenes to make them less explicit and to achieve less restrictive release classifications.

There are some changes coming to the upcoming season of NCIS, which is about to be in its 21st season.