Tokyo Film Festival Opens With Song, Monsters and History

Tokyo Film Festival opens its latest edition today with a programme that tries to hold several kinds of cinema in one frame: a musical drama about a beloved song, a monster sequel made for the biggest screen, and a closing zombie blockbuster from Korea. The festival runs in central Tokyo through early November, with screenings spread across the Hibiya, Yurakucho, Marunouchi and Ginza districts. According to Screen Daily, the event pairs a world premiere opener with a centrepiece screening that has already generated festival buzz, giving audiences a clear journey from intimate music history to large-scale spectacle.

The scale is the first thing to grasp. This edition presents more than two hundred films from well over one hundred countries and regions, a lineup announced at the start of the month that expands on last year. The competition section alone carries fifteen features, mixing world premieres with films making their first appearance for Asian audiences. That balance matters: it lets the festival act both as a launchpad for new work and as a showcase for films that have already found audiences elsewhere, a dual role few festivals manage at this size.

The opening film tells the story behind a song most listeners know even if they do not know its history. The drama follows the composer, lyricist and singer behind a Japanese hit that became the first song from Japan to top the American charts in the early nineteen-sixties, and it arrives with a cast led by well-known Japanese screen actors. For younger viewers, the appeal is not nostalgia alone: it is a reminder that a three-minute pop song can carry the story of a country rebuilding after war, and that music history is also social history. Readers who enjoy nights out built around shared experiences may recognise the same communal pull described in reporting on board game cafes winning the night out, where the event matters as much as the entertainment itself.

A monster sequel takes the centrepiece slot

The centrepiece film is the follow-up to an Oscar-winning monster feature, set two years after its predecessor and returning to the same family at the heart of that story. According to festival coverage, it is the first Japanese production filmed for the largest cinema format, which explains why organisers placed it at the heart of the programme rather than at its edges. The choice also signals confidence: instead of reserving the centrepiece for a small arthouse title, the festival is putting a major genre film alongside international prestige cinema and letting audiences judge it on the same terms.

That confidence has a commercial logic too. The predecessor won the Academy Award for visual effects, and the sequel arrives with a built-in audience that extends far beyond festival regulars. By screening it in Tokyo before its local theatrical release in early November, the festival turns a premiere into a cultural event, with fans, press and industry guests sharing the same room. The strategy mirrors how festivals increasingly use genre titles to draw new audiences who might then stay for a competition film or a restored classic they would not otherwise have chosen.

The closing film, a Korean zombie blockbuster from the director behind a famous train thriller, gives the festival a different kind of energy at the end of its run. It premiered at Cannes and has already performed strongly at the Korean box office, so its closing slot feels like a celebration rather than a gamble. Together, the opener, centrepiece and closer give the edition a clear arc: song, monster, and survival story, each from a different corner of popular cinema.

History, competition and why the festival matters now

Beyond the headline titles, the competition and retrospective sections carry the festival's deeper argument. Many competition films deal with historical incidents, from post-independence turmoil to a stadium tragedy and wartime resistance, and the programming director has suggested that filmmakers are turning to the past to understand why the present feels so divided. That thread gives the edition coherence: it is not just a collection of premieres, but a conversation about how history shapes the present, conducted through fiction, documentary and genre alike.

A restored classics programme honours a master director of Japanese cinema, with more than a dozen restored films presented across multiple programmes, all with English subtitles. For students and first-time viewers, that is a rare chance to see canonical work on a big screen with proper context, rather than as a small image on a phone. Festivals often talk about preservation; this programme puts it into practice, and it pairs naturally with the new films by showing where their visual language came from. Travellers planning a cinema trip can find a similar sense of place-first travel in reporting on dark sky travel turning night into the trip itself, where the destination shapes the experience.

New leadership adds another layer to this edition. A returning festival director, a former studio executive who previously held the role, takes charge with a stated aim of adding glamour while shifting the balance between entertainment and arthouse titles. The appointment suggests organisers want both: the prestige of a serious festival and the excitement of a popular one. If the opening weekend delivers on that promise, with rain-soaked red carpets and packed screenings, the edition could set the tone for how the festival positions itself in the years ahead.

There is a counterpoint to the celebration, and it is worth naming. A festival of this size cannot show everything, and the sheer number of titles means many worthy films will play once to small rooms while attention concentrates on a few stars. Ticketing, timing and language access also shape who actually gets in, especially for visitors travelling to Tokyo for the event. Those limits do not diminish the programme, but they do remind readers that a festival lineup is a starting point, not a guarantee, and that checking screening details before travelling remains essential.

Tokyo Film Festival therefore arrives as more than a calendar entry. It is a test of whether a major festival can be popular and serious at once, whether a song from the nineteen-sixties can still move a new audience, and whether a monster movie can sit comfortably beside restored classics and urgent new dramas. For film lovers, the next ten days offer a rare concentration of all three, and for the wider culture, the edition shows Japanese cinema asserting itself on a world stage without apologising for its popular roots. The festival was covered by Screen Daily, which reported the opening, centrepiece and closing selections and the background to each film.