Tokyo reopens the major festival season with Godzilla and an award dedicated to film history

The Tokyo International Film Festival opened its 39th edition on October 26, with a ceremony at Hulic Hall Tokyo in Yurakucho, launching ten days of screenings spread across the districts of Hibiya, Yurakucho, Marunouchi and Ginza, running through November 4 (official TIFF website).

The choice of centerpiece film, ‘Godzilla-0.0’, presented as the sequel to the film that won the Academy Award for visual effects, signals the festival’s editorial line: holding together Japanese genre cinema, capable of international appeal, with a program that also includes auteur previews. These include the Palme d’or-winning film directed by Cristian Mungiu and ‘El ser querido’, starring Javier Bardem, included in the Gala Selection section (Cula).

The novelty of this edition is the establishment of the Kawakita Kashiko award, presented for the first time and won by Japan’s Sahoko Hata. The award takes its name from the historic distributor credited with introducing to Japan titles such as ‘Breathless’ and ‘Purple Noon’: a prize that looks not at production but at the often less visible work of those who bring foreign cinema beyond their own linguistic and commercial borders (TIFF - News).

The institutional context matters: the Tokyo International Film Festival is classified by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations as a category A festival, the same level reserved for events such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin (official TIFF website). This is a classification concerning the competition’s format, not its media visibility in the West, where the festival remains less covered compared to European events: a mismatch between formal weight and international attention that has accompanied Tokyo’s editions for years.

The 2026 program, with ten days of screenings across four central districts of the Japanese capital, confirms the strategy of spreading events throughout the urban fabric rather than concentrating them in a single exhibition hub, a model that distinguishes Tokyo from other category A festivals organized around a single cinema complex.