On our 17th year, the Festival took a new direction with the appointment of Yasuhiro Hariki as its new Director General, and by adding the word “international” (“kokusai” in Japanese) to our Japanese name to match our English name.

The Festival made a conceptual presentation of its program line-up in an effort to make it easier for the audience to select the films of their choice. As a result, our feature programs were produced under such headings as “Woman of Asia, Brush Away Your Tears and Dance!”, “Diaspora Asia-The Deepa Mehta Trilogy”, “The Folk History of Japan” and “Films Supported by the Fukuoka Film Commission”. Additionally we put together an attractive Asian film lineup of brand new and much talked about titles, encompassing a wide spectrum of Asian film splendor from art to entertainment.

Our opening film, “Tuya’s Marriage”, a film directed by Wang Quanan, which won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2006, has since been theatrically released in Tokyo during the 2008 New Year holiday season. As far as our Fukuoka Audience Award（Kodak VISION Award）, which was started last year, our award for 2007 went to “The White Silk Dress”, a Vietnamese film directed by Luu Huynh Luu.

A wide variety of events were held during the Festival. Film directors to films featured in our ““Woman of Asia, Brush Away Your Tears and Dance!” section of our program were invited as panelists to a Forum where they exchanged views on the topic of women and dance in motion pictures, after the screening of “Hula Girl” a much talked about film within the Japanese film industry in 2006. Additionally, we exhibited 6 award-winning titles from the Busan Asian Short Film Festival, held in Busan, Korea, a city, which formalized a sister-city relationship with Fukuoka in 2007. A special symposium entitled, “A New Breeze From Busan” was presented featuring the Director of the Busan Asian Short Film Festival and the film directors to the award winning titles exhibited. On another note, the exhibition of “Koume, the Legendary Singer”, a documentary on the life of Akasaka Koume, a nationally renowned female singer in Japan born in Fukuoka, was accompanied by performances of the Tankobushi, a local dance which originated as a coal miners’ work song, and SP phonographic recitals of the singer, which helped liven up the audience.

In August, before the opening of the Festival, a series of 3 lecture courses entitled “Cinema de Asia” was held at the Fukuoka City Public Library Movie Hall Cine-la for the purpose of broadening the audience base for Asian films. The courses featured
distinguished guests such as Lee Bong-Ou, Nobuko Takagi and Kenji Ishizaka who, with Yasuhiro Hariki, the Festival Director, held discussions on stage after the exhibition of Asian films.