Nippon Connection 2020 - Day 1

Let us try something new this year!
We now have less time to watch movies and even less to go to Film Festivals. On top of that, travels are restricted in this COVID-19 period so attending movie Festivals is out of the question anyway.
Some of them have moved online for this year's edition, which is for us a renewed opportunity to attend at our pace and from home. We are thus here today to cover the Nippon Connection 2020 Online Festival specialized in, you guess, Japanese Cinema. We have always wanted to visit it and never could. It seems a nice alternative to our beloved Udine Far East Film Festival, which will also be online this year and which we also plan to cover.
We will post reviews about the movies we see as usual when we attend Festivals, and maybe publish a report at the end, but we also wanted to try and report on the Festival on a daily basis. Here we go for our first report!

We have inspected the movie programme as soon as it came out and selected the ones we wanted to see. We also looked at the list of events and selected a few.
Many events are for free, with a fixed schedule, while renting a movie costs 5 euros for 24 hours.
We won't be able to live the Festival 24 hours a day like we do when we are there in person, but we are targeting one movie and one event per day.

The first event was the Opening Ceremony which gave us a nice introduction to the Festival with anecdotes from its birth and its past, when it was hard to get movies for a Festival, how it has evolved, in particular its Digital section renamed Visions, now that most movies are projected in digital anyways.
About the different sections: Nippon Cinema shows mainstream or blockbusters, or art-house films from established filmmakers, while Visions is more experimental and features debut films or shorts. There is also a Documentary section, and this year's Focus section is on Female Futures? – New Visions Of Women In Japan, reminding us of the panel we followed at the FANTASPOA 2017 Festival in Porto Alegre (Brazil). Many documentaries are also directed by or about women.
And of course there is an Animation section. Check this link for all the Japanese Animation reviews on JoRafCinema.
The Ceremony was also peppered by messages from several Japanese Directors in support to the Festival, and concluded with a concert of the traditional Japanese string instrument 'sanshin' which nicely accompanied our lunch.

The first movie we selected is the documentary An Ant Strikes Back, by Tokachi TSUCHIYA, and see what we have to say about it and about this first Festival day:

See you soon!
Jo&Raf