Takeo Hisamatsu is not asking for patience. The director of the Tokyo Film Festival is asking for money, for a fuller social calendar and for a place on the global stage that he believes Japanese cinema has earned and has not been given. Hisamatsu has spent much of his tenure arguing that Tokyo's festival should function less like a polite annual showcase and more like an engine for the international business of Japanese film. That argument is now at the center of his public message.
Hisamatsu's diagnosis is blunt: Japan makes a great deal of cinema, and much of it never travels far. The festival, he contends, has a role to play in changing that, but only if it is funded and positioned to compete with the major events that dominate the international calendar. He has pushed for a larger budget, a more visible party and networking circuit around the official program, and a marketing effort that reaches buyers, programmers and journalists well before the festival opens its doors.
Money First
Hisamatsu has been candid that ambition costs money. A larger festival, with more international guests, more industry programming and more support for filmmakers trying to find overseas partners, cannot run on goodwill alone. He has called for greater financial backing, arguing that a festival's clout on the world stage is tied directly to what it can offer the people it invites.
That message is directed at several audiences at once. Public funders, private sponsors and the wider Japanese industry all have a stake in whether Tokyo's festival can grow. Hisamatsu's case is that the return on that investment is not merely cultural prestige but commercial reach: a festival that gathers the right people in the right rooms creates deals that outlast the event itself.
The Case for a Better Party
Hisamatsu's push for more parties and a more vibrant social program has raised a few eyebrows, but it reflects a practical view of how the film business works. Festivals are not just screenings. They are meeting places, and much of the real business happens after the lights go up - over drinks, at receptions, in the informal spaces where a distributor meets a director and a conversation turns into a partnership.
For Hisamatsu, a festival without that energy is a festival that fails to convert attention into relationships. He wants Tokyo to be a place where international visitors feel compelled to stay another day, to take one more meeting, to remember a Japanese title when they return home. The party, in this reading, is infrastructure.
A Global Profile for Japanese Cinema
Underpinning all of it is Hisamatsu's central concern: the international profile of Japanese cinema. Japan's film heritage is celebrated worldwide, and its contemporary output travels through festivals and streaming platforms, yet Hisamatsu has argued that the country's cinema is often treated as a niche interest rather than a mainstream force. He wants Tokyo's festival to serve as a bridge - a venue where the breadth of Japanese filmmaking, from established names to new voices, is presented to the world in a way that invites acquisition, coverage and curiosity.
That means making international delegates feel that time spent in Tokyo is time well spent. It also means reaching audiences beyond the festival circuit, using the event as a launchpad for wider distribution and for sustained coverage in overseas markets.
What It Will Take
Hisamatsu's agenda is easy to state and difficult to deliver. Bigger budgets require advocates with long memories and open checkbooks. A more prominent international profile requires the cooperation of an industry that is sometimes content to look inward. And the competition is fierce: festivals across Asia and beyond are all chasing the same guests, the same premieres and the same limited attention from a global press corps.
None of this has escaped Hisamatsu, whose tenure has been marked by a willingness to raise uncomfortable questions in public. Whether Tokyo's festival can translate that willingness into deeper funding and a lasting shift in its international standing is the open question hanging over his plans. What is not in doubt is the direction he has set. Hisamatsu is asking for more - and he is asking loudly, on the record, and with the conviction of a director who believes the alternative is to keep watching Japanese cinema's international potential go only partly realized.
Source: Hollywood Reporter