Italy’s pioneering Far East Film Festival will honor Japan’s Takeshi Kitano — actor, director, comedian, TV presenter and yakuza cinema legend — with its Golden Mulberry Award, a lifetime achievement honor that recognizes outstanding contributions to popular cinema.
The 75-year-old performer, also known by his stage name “Beat Takeshi,” will travel to the festival, held annually in the picturesque northern Italian city of Udine, to receive his honor in person at a special gala on April 29.
The largest film festival in Europe specializing in Asian cinema, FEFF is returning this year for its first full-scale, globally attended edition of the pandemic era. The festival featured a mix of virtual and in-person screenings last year.
In many ways Kitano would appear an ideal embodiment of the festival’s programming ethos. Unlike most European festivals, which tend to emphasize the rarified aesthetics of Asian art house cinema, Udine is foremost devoted to providing a platform for filmmaking from the Far East that has achieved commercial traction in its home markets — thus offering festival-goers a surprisingly rare window onto the contemporary cinema that the world’s most populous region is actually watching en masse.
Kitano is a figure whose career has crossed nearly every facet of Japanese filmed entertainment, achieving both niche cult acclaim and broad popular success. Once described by influential Japanese critic Nagaharu Yodogawa as “the true successor” to Akira Kurosawa, Kitano famously began his career in the 1970s with a bawdy take on Japan’s Manzai standup comedy tradition, rising to become one of the country’s most recognizable comedians.
After several eye-catching supporting performances, one of his first serious roles on film came in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which he played a brutal WWII POW camp sergeant opposite Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie. Following other acting jobs he launched his career as a director with the neo-noir Violent Cop (1989), in which he also starred. In the 1980s, he became the host and star of Takeshi’s Castle, one of the longest-running and most successful Japanese variety shows of all time. His directorial career took international flight with the release of yakuza classic Sonatine (1993), and he gained greater acclaim with the heartfelt crime drama Hana-bi, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1997.
A string of festival contenders and fan favorites followed, including Kikujiro (1999), Dolls (2002), and Zatōichi (2003), among others. His trilogy of hardboiled yakuza films — Outrage (2010), Beyond Outrage (2012) and Outrage Coda (2017) — is a pillar of the genre. His stony visage became even more globally known thanks to his starring role in Battle Royale (2000), which helped define the death game genre (long before Squid Game). Among his dozens of other screen credits, Kitano also has periodically appeared in Hollywood projects, such as Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Ghost in the Shell (2017).
“Udine’s festival crowns Takeshi Kitano for his thrilling journey across genres and styles and between cinema and television,” FEFF’s organizers said in a statement, describing the actor/director as “one of the giants of world cinema.”
The 2022 Udine Far East Film Festival runs April 22-30. The event’s full lineup will be unveiled on April 12.
Source: Hollywood
