The 39th Tokyo International Film Festival will run from 26 October to 4 November with 204 films, a 15-film competition, a jury led by the Australian director Rolf de Heer and a new competitive section for Japanese cinema.
The 39th Tokyo International Film Festival runs from 26 October to 4 November 2026 and will show 204 films in several sections, according to Screen Daily’s report on its lineup. The festival director is Takeo Hisamatsu, who returns to the post after running the festival from 2017 to 2021.
The main competition has 15 titles from Asia, Europe and South America, seven of them world premieres, according to the report. The titles named include Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting by Qiu Jiongjiong, an epic told through surreal feasts and filmed entirely in a hand-painted studio; Red Before Dawn by the Indonesian director Garin Nugroho, set in Indonesia in 1946 after independence; and Trees Are Watching by Bahman Ghobadi, executive produced by Martin Scorsese and starring Eva Green. The competition jury will be led by the Australian director Rolf de Heer.
The festival adds a new competitive section called Nippon Cinema Now for contemporary Japanese cinema, with awards for best film and a special jury prize. The Asian Future section is for emerging Asian filmmakers who have completed up to three films, and it has ten titles, eight of them world premieres, according to Screen Daily.
The opening film is the musical drama Sukiyaki, and the closing film is the Korean zombie film Colony. Godzilla Minus Zero is the centrepiece feature, according to the report. The sources reviewed do not give the release dates for these films or the venues for the screenings.
Two honours have been announced. The Kurosawa Akira Award will go to the Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof and the Japanese director Mipo O, according to Screen Daily and The Hollywood Reporter headlines. A new Kashiko Kawakita Award will honour women in cinema, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety headlines, which also describe the new initiatives. The details of the Kawakita Award, including its prize and its criteria, were not available in the sources reviewed.
The festival arrives after the busy autumn festival season. London closes on 18 October, as Delima News has reported, and the Rome Film Festival, which runs from 13 to 25 October, honours Javier Bardem and Tessa Ross with lifetime achievement awards, according to a search summary of the Rome festival’s programme. Busan, which took place earlier in October, announced its winners this week.
The list of competition titles reported above is only the three the report highlights, so the other twelve films are not named here. The festival’s website would give the full list, with the countries of origin and the directors.
The scale can be put in simple terms. The festival runs for ten days, from 26 October to 4 November, and 204 films over ten days is about 20 a day, which is Delima News’ own calculation from the figures in the report. Seven of the 15 competition films, and eight of the ten Asian Future films, are world premieres, so about half of the competition and most of the emerging-talent section will be seen for the first time in Tokyo.
The results of the competition will be announced at the festival’s awards ceremony, which the Hollywood Reporter says will take place during the festival, and Delima News will report on the winners after the closing night.
Image: The Tokyo International Forum (file photo; a stand-in image). Photo: MaedaAkihiko / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
