IFFR’s V-Cinema Focus programme contains many early works by Japan’s best-known directors, but there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Okawa Toshimichi or Tsuruta Norio. Make no mistake: they are two of the most influential Japanese filmmakers of the past 40 years.
Okawa’s 1989 debut feature Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage opened the floodgates of V-Cinema, Japan’s direct-to-video industry that delivered well over a hundred films a year for nearly two decades, becoming an inadvertent launch platform for filmmakers and film genres. As such, Crime Hunter’s influence reaches all the way to Hollywood boardrooms and festival red carpets. In 1991, Tsuruta made the direct-to-video series Scary True Stories, which laid down the ground rules for J-horror, the genre that would become a global phenomenon. In this conversation moderated by Tom Mes, Okawa and Tsuruta finally get the spotlight, to talk about working in V-Cinema and their unique position in Japanese film history.
