Tokyo Film Festival and Market Set Dates for Hybrid Editions

The Tokyo International Film Festival and its accompanying TIFFCOM market will this year be held as hybrid editions combining real world and online activities. Both activities have set dates for 2021 that are largely back at their traditional time of year.

The festival will run from Oct. 30, 2021 to Nov. 8, 2021, a ten-day stretch from Saturday to Monday. The market will operate for three week-days from Monday Nov. 1 to Wednesday Nov. 3, 2021.

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Last year due to the coronavirus outbreak and the restrictions it posed on cross-border travel, the festival was operated in a scaled-down fashion with some in-person events and others online. The rights market became an entirely online affair.

Retaining another aspect of last year’s events, the Tokyo International Film Festival will again collaborate with former rival festival Tokyo Filmex. “TIFF will continue deepening our ties with Tokyo Filmex, which will be held from October 30 (Sat.) through November 7 (Sun.),” the Tokyo festival said in a statement.

By planning for hybrid editions in mid-autumn, the festival and market appear to be assuming that the coronavirus will still be creating uncertainty and travel problems for businesses. That is an approach that is more cautious than the forward planning of the summer and paralympic editions of the Olympic Games which are still currently scheduled to be held in August. Public opinion in Japan about the Olympics is reported to be largely negative.

Japan has not suffered the enormous death tolls from COVOD-19 that have been experienced in the U.S. or Europe, but it has struggled to bring the situation under control quickly. Emergency measures were removed on Monday March 1 from six prefectures, but they remain in place in Tokyo and three other prefectures. The government task force on coronavirus will meet on Friday to decide when Tokyo can exit the stage 4 emergency state.

Japan has recorded just over 432,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and suffered 7,889 related deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

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