Over the last decade, film education has become an increasingly important topic for film festivals around the world, as they attempt to cultivate the future of cinema. And no film education is better than actually making a film and watching it on a big screen with your collaborators. Since 2017, the Tokyo International Film Festival has been making that dream come true for selected teenagers with the project Teens Meet Cinema.
 
This past summer, 18 junior high school students participated in a filmmaking workshop for the 8th edition of Teens Meet Cinema, collaboration between TIFF and Children Meet Cinema. Mentored by Nishikawa Miwa, the renowned filmmaker of such titles as Sway (2006) and Under the Open Sky (2020), the students experienced filmmaking in eight days, from plot development to filming, editing, and finally, public screening.
 
On November 3, the 37th TIFF held TIFF 2024: Teens Meet Cinema as part of the Youth section, in which three films made by the teens had their world premieres.
 
First, there was a screening of “When a Film is Born” Making of TIFF 2024: Teens Meet Cinema, a 41-minute documentary about the summer workshop. The documentary shows how the students managed to make the films in just 8 days, in response to the theme given them by Nishikawa: “Listening to others and making a story.” The participants were divided into three groups and made one film each as a collaborative effort, without any presence of dictatorial directors. This meant that every creative decision (what to shoot, from which angle, what the story means, etc.) was made through ongoing discussions.
 
Team Red’s XX Project was the first teen film that was screened. In it, the members of the table tennis club have to prove their talents in order to save the club from disbandment. It is a surreal comedy that champions the fighting spirit of the downtrodden in the face of bureaucratic control. For the young filmmakers, shooting a climatic ping-pong fight was especially difficult. According to Shiraishi Kiichi, who played the role of the student body president, “We were playing ping-pong seriously. There were many times when I won the two points first and the table tennis club got disbanded. So we had to do it again and again.”
 
Team Blue made Your Dream is Beautiful, in which a junior high school student notices his only friend’s odd behavior. The film finds strangeness in seemingly mundane everyday life and depicts the vulnerability of friendship, leading to a heartbreaking pay-off. Tomano Rinko, who was in charge of camera and music, explained how the team created this lyrical film that is open to many interpretations. She said, “Because there were many ideas about this film, six of us had different goals at the beginning. We talked a lot to each other and tried to find the same direction. The time spent exchanging ideas with each other was actually very precious for me.”
 
Last but not least, The Words Write Themselves by Team Yellow concluded the program. It depicts lazy students in the school newspaper club who finally get motivated to publish something meaningful. Combining fiction and documentary, the film explores the power of filmmaking and journalism through an investigation of local history amidst globalization. Playing an iconic English-speaking student, Kato Lurie said in English, “I thought [speaking in English only] would make the movie more interesting, because you don’t really expect Japanese movies to have someone who isn’t speaking in Japanese.”
 
One policy of Teens Meet Cinema is that adults are not supposed to guide the teen filmmakers by word or action once teams have been formed. As the lead mentor of the project, Nishikawa tried to strictly follow that policy, respecting the process of collaborative decision-making. “You might think that directors are the ones who are rich in ideas,” she told the audience. “Actually, that’s not true. Film is made with many people. Each member of the team has great abilities. That is the wonderful thing about filmmaking.”
 
TIFF 2024: Teens Meet Cinema
Q&A: Nishikawa Miwa (Filmmaker/ Lead mentor of TIFF 2024: Teens Meet Cinema)