Yoshida's Mentor Lands World Premiere at Warsaw Film Festival
A Japanese film with a heavy premise about atonement and guilt played as comedy to a Polish audience, which is the reception Yoshida's stated intent was built to test.
Reporting from 1 source: Cinema Today.
Keisuke Yoshida's film Mentor, starring Hayato Isomura and Seiya Suezawa with Go Ayano, held its world premiere in the International Competition at the 42nd Warsaw International Film Festival. Screenings on October 10 and 11 drew over 200 people to the Palace of Culture and Science, with laughter during the film and applause at the credits. Yoshida attended both Q&As.
Mentor screened twice at the Palace of Culture and Science, on October 10 and 11, in the festival's main competition, ahead of its October 16 release in Japan. The story follows Takumi and Ryunosuke, who caused a fire fifteen years earlier, and their strained reunion with Nomoto, who lost his wife and child in it. Yoshida told the Q&A that the script took longer to write than any of his previous films and that the theme is what an offender must do to count as having reflected. A Polish audience question about forgiveness and revenge led Yoshida to explain that the film began from moving the forgiveness scene, usually the ending, to the start.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- Cinema Today 磯村勇斗＆末澤誠也W主演『mentor』海外映画祭を笑いに包む ワルシャワの観客に吉田恵輔監督感謝