Kenji Ishizaka

My name is Kenji Ishizaka and I am from Japan Institute of the Moving Image (JIMI). JIMI was founded by director Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), who won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival twice for The Ballad of Narayama and The Eel, with his own funds. It is the first film university in Japan, and many creators, including directors and screenwriters, teach at JIMI. I have lectures on Asian film history, documentary film history, film distribution theory, and screening planning workshops, and I serve as a provost and the director of the International Exchange Center.

Born in 1960 in Tokyo, I earned my MA degree from the graduate school of Waseda University. From 1990 to 2007, I was the Film Coordinator at the Japan Foundation and has organized more than seventy film events on Asian and Arab cinema.

Now I have been in charge of the Asian film section of the Tokyo International Film Festival as a senior programmer since 2007, and spend my days watching many films made in a wide range of regions from East Asia to the Middle East. I frequently travel to Asian countries for research and communicate with people involved in the film industry, and have served as a jury at international film festivals in Hawaii, Delhi, Busan, Bangkok, and other places.

As a researcher, my fields of expertise are Asian cinema and documentary cinema. In Asian cinema, I began by studying the people and works I encountered at the film festivals, and have published co-authored books such as "Forest of the Asian Cinema" (2012) and "Dynamic Southeast Asian Cinema" (2019). In the documentary field, I was fascinated by the unique history of Japanese documentary cinema, and in particular studied "Minamata disease," which became known worldwide through the American film MINAMATA starring Johnny Depp. I published "Amidst the Ocean of Documentary: Dialogues with Noriaki Tsuchimoto" (2008), a co-authored book with documentary director Noriaki Tsuchimoto (1928-2008), who filmed the documentary series over a period of 40 years.