Three contenders in the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Asian Future competition have their first Tokyo screenings on Tuesday 27 October. Ariani Darmawan’s Indonesian drama Jani Be Good and Kujiraoka Hironori’s Japanese comedy Saravah are world premieres; Katski Flores’s Philippine historical drama EDJOP is an international premiere. The section, for first and second features by Asian directors, has ten films this year, eight of them world premieres, competing for the Asian Future Best Film Award.
Key facts
- Asian Future: 10 films, 8 world premieres, at the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, 26 October–4 November
- Tuesday 27 October: EDJOP at 13:40 and Jani Be Good at 17:10 at TOHO Cinemas Chanter; Saravah at 19:25 at Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (Tokyo time)
- The section opened on Monday with the Kazakh debut Shyrmauyq
Tuesday’s three
Jani Be Good (Desember Jani) is the first feature by Darmawan, a Bandung-born writer, director and video artist whose shorts have played Clermont-Ferrand and Busan. Set over four days in December, it follows 13-year-old Jani, played by Chempa Puteri, who waits for her older sister Julia (Hyori Mika) to come home and blames their mother Winnie (Sigi Wimala), a single parent who works to keep the family going. Tutie Kirana plays the grandmother. Darmawan co-wrote the script with the poet Cyntha Hariadi, developing it over three years from Hariadi’s short-story collection Manifesto Flora. Jakarta’s Palari Films, run by Meiske Taurisia and Muhammad Zaidy, produced it with the actor Luna Maya as executive producer, on a budget of about $747,000, according to the company. It opens in Indonesian cinemas on 10 December. Palari’s Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash won Locarno’s Golden Leopard in 2021.
EDJOP follows two lives half a century apart. One is the student leader Edgar “Edjop” Jopson, who campaigned against Ferdinand Marcos under martial law and was killed in 1982. The other is his eldest daughter Joyette, a triathlete in today’s Philippines who resents the father she never knew. Elijah Canlas plays Jopson and Jodi Sta. Maria plays Joyette; Frankie Pangilinan and Cedrick Juan are also in the cast. Open Water Productions and The Mad Goats, which Flores co-founded, produced. The film had its local premiere in September, and a grant from the Film Development Council of the Philippines is supporting its festival run. Its European premiere is at the Asian Film Festival Barcelona on 31 October, and its North American premiere at the San Diego Asian Film Festival on 14 November, the Inquirer reported.
Saravah, Kujiraoka’s second feature, is an independent production written by five filmmakers who have worked on his short films. A man takes a ghostwriting job for a well-known screenwriter, which brings three former classmates back together after ten years. Otomo Ritsu, Matsumoto Mai and Tokunaga Ōsuke star.
The rest of the field
Two of the ten are Iranian. I’m Nothing Special Really is the directing debut of the actor Navid Mohammadzadeh, who won best actor in Tokyo in 2019 for Just 6.5; it is an ensemble piece about young people in Tehran, in which a woman sets off with her sister after a break-up. Soheil Karimi’s Silver is about a village boy who takes his grandmother’s silver necklace to town to raise money for the treatment of a girl’s mother, and is cheated out of it.
From Kazakhstan, Azamat Shargyn’s debut Shyrmauyq centres on a grandmother who holds a village household together after her daughter-in-law leaves for the city. Korea’s On the Heights, from the critic and filmmaker Kim Hyun-min, follows a mother and daughter estranged after a suicide in the family.
India’s entry is The Paper Flower, a 75-minute Tamil romance about an artist who meets a Sri Lankan refugee again at a book fair, 12 years after they first met. It is directed by Chezhiyan, a cinematographer and author of books on cinema, who died in July. Serife Tavsan, a Swiss-Turkish co-production from the Kabul-born, Geneva-raised director Tareq Daoud, is about a widow who finds new energy at poetry readings, to her sons’ dismay. Japan’s second entry, the Chinese-born Cai Ronglin’s 65-minute Miracle Summer, follows a busy city worker who goes back to her home town and joins her little brother and his friends in chasing a “tiny being”.
At least four of the ten are first features, according to the festival’s notes. Prizes are announced at the closing ceremony on 4 November.
The festival’s market, TIFFCOM, runs from 28 to 30 October. Our earlier report covered sold-out advance screenings at this year’s festival, and our coverage of Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market looked at how Asian films are being sold. More is in our festivals and markets section.
Sources
- Tokyo International Film Festival, Asian Future film pages (39002ASF01-10) and screening schedule
- Antara, Palari Films press release, 2 October 2026
- Antara Mataram, 27 October 2026
- Philippine Daily Inquirer, 14 October 2026
- ABS-CBN, 15 October 2026
- San Diego Asian Film Festival, EDJOP page
- Variety, 26 October 2026 (event trigger; framing not used)