When Row House Cinema started planning an in-person Japanese Film Festival in December, it seemed like a surefire proposition given the direction the COVID-19 pandemic was trending at the time.
“Everyone saw the light,” said Keith Strausbaugh, Row House’s programming and film club manager. “We were getting closer, and then omicron hits. We were moving forward with programming and planning and fingers were crossed that it would all work out. And luckily it did.”
An in-person 2022 Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival is proceeding full steam ahead starting Friday and running through March 31 at the Lawrenceville-based indie theater. Row House had been hosting the festival since 2016 but was forced to cancel its 2020 and 2021 iterations due to COVID concerns.
This year’s festival will be the fifth one Row House has served as a venue for and will also be its first in-person festival since the theater fully reopened in September.
“There’s such an energy and an experience to be had in a small theater like Row House,” said marketing manager Kelsey Zehmisch. “We really believe in that, and we’re happy to bring that full scale to the Pittsburgh film scene.”
Full-festival ($84), single-week ($49), closing-night ($27) and individual film tickets ($12) are available at jffpgh.org. The festival will also include a few special events attached to certain screenings like a tea tasting and dance performance with showings of Ayumu Watanabe’s 2021 film “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko” on March 20 and Masahiro Shinoda’s 1964 film “Pale Flower” on March 29, respectively.
Zehmisch said that Row House largely spent the last six months “learning how to run a movie theater in a pandemic safely.” That included instituting a requirement that all patrons provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative test upon entry. Since reopening, Row House’s staff has mostly stayed healthy and hasn’t experienced much pushback on safety protocols, Zehmisch said.
“It was really a blow” when Row House was forced to shut down in March 2020 and abandon that year’s Japanese Film Festival right before it was about to begin, she said. It’s generally the biggest annual event Row House throws “both in effort and turnout,” Zehmisch said, and she expects to see upwards of 1,000 folks during its two-week run.
The 2022 lineup is divided into three categories: classics, newer fare and yakuza-themed films. Some of the more notable titles include Yasujiro Ozu’s “Dragnet Girl” (1933), Akira Kurasawa’s “Stray Dog” (1949), Seijun Suzuki’s “Tokyo Drifter (1966), Kenji Iwaisawa’s “On-Gaku” (2019) and Akiko Ohku’s “Hold Me Back” (2020).
Despite Row House playing a handful of Japanese films throughout the year, Strausbaugh and Zehmisch encountered some unique challenges while trying to secure the programming for this year’s festival.
“It’s kind of a big leap of faith that this was going to work,” Zehmisch said. “These are not films we would be able to show in a normal week. ... There are some strange and unexpected hoops we have to jump through.”
For example, it took quite a bit of effort to show Mitsuaki Iwago’s 2019 film “The Island of Cats” on opening night. Strausbaugh said that it originally came in VHS form from Japan. Row House had to enlist the services of The MediaPreserve in Cranberry to digitize the film so it could be projected in Row House’s theater.
Japanese cinema is currently having a moment stateside thanks to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” earning a best picture nomination at the 2022 Academy Awards. The Japanese Film Festival celebrates the “long and impressive history” of that country’s filmmaking and features a diverse enough array of choices that it shouldn’t feel like “homework viewing,” Strausbaugh said.
Strausbaugh moved to Pittsburgh in July 2021 after spending eight years in Los Angeles. He teaches story and screenwriting courses at Point Park University and has been working at Row House since December. During his time there, Row House’s film club has grown to 450 members, an indication to Strausbaugh that there’s a strong appetite for both independent films and communal movie-watching experiences in the Steel City.
“I think it’s part of innately who we are,” he said. “A group of strangers around a flickering campfire or a bunch of people in the dark watching Japanese films is a shared experience. That’s what you get from going to a theater.”
Considering all the work the Row House team has put into the festival, they would definitely appreciate it if Pittsburghers validated their efforts by checking out a movie or two.
“It’s a great opportunity to see some amazing films that aren’t commonly shown in Pittsburgh,” Zehmisch said. “We’ve done a lot of work really curating this list, so we hope people really enjoy it.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: March 15, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: March 15, 2022, 10:28 a.m.
