Ah, I see. Thanks for the info! My friend got it working now. It appears that the availability is linked to the country you indicate when you register your account and not to your location.
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Erm… that’s a bit “unsecure” on their side… 
But good to know, thank you! 
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I’m not 100% sure, might have been the location after all, but then log out and log in again from the new location. (Which happened automatically when I tried to make a new account configured to another place but at that time my official location was still Australia)
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Welp, apparently I left it too late to book tickets for the in-person JFF this year, and all the films I wanted to see save one are sold out.
This festival had a lot more screenings of each film pre-covid…
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Me too, but the Melbourne screenings take place right in the middle of exam season, so maybe that’s a good thing.
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I’m seeing some today & tomorrow in Brisbane.
I just take potluck with the films. In the past, the films I’ve wanted to see were disappointing & ones I had zero expectations of turned out to be good. “Zombie Apocalypse”, however, was exactly what I was expecting (I saw it for free so couldn’t complain)
For those in Australia who don’t know, here are the venues and dates:
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Well, I’ve seen two of my four films. The first こんにちは、母さん wasn’t bad but it wasn’t exactly great either, but OUT on the other hand was surprisingly (for me, anyway) good. A manga adaptation, it had some fantastic choreographed fight scenes & some wonderful cuts to manga images. My fave for today.
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10月20日(日)
So I saw my last two of the 4 films I planned to see this weekend at the JFF - a Netflix produced Ghibliesque anime 屋根裏のラジャー and a comedic homage to 時代劇: 侍タイムスリッパー. Enjoyed both but probably wouldn’t choose to watch either again. My overall festival favourite remains OUT
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Well, well, well… they are stepping up their game in November, with no less than eight titles streaming
Okay, five are stop-motion animation shorts but out of the three feature films, two of them were on my watchlist already 
And with no country restrictions that I can see mentioned in the e-mail, but it’s early morning here so… maybe I missed something 
The feature films all have good ratings on IMDb and Letterboxd:
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Hah, I just got that e-mail too. Highly recommend Her Love Boils Bathwater.
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Where are you finding these? I’ve gotten a bit lost which film festival or website is being discussed! 
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It’s the JFF Theater website:
They’ve moved from a once-a-year model to always streaming, with a monthly schedule for a selection of titles.
Let’s ping @soggyboy… maybe it would be worth updating the thread title and including the new link in the first post?
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I’m not sure if it’s on your watchlist, but Key of Life is a fun, easy watch, and the Japanese in the movie is pretty simple to follow.
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Yeah… that was the one not on the watchlist
But thank you! Hey, it’ll be free so might as well watch it at some point in Nov, right?
More so if it gets a recommendation here
I may even try out the animations too, although I’ve recently watched the British horror Stopmotion (it was cool!) and that makes the stop-motion genre somewhat less enticing
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Thanks so much! I remembered something like a new link but scrolling up I couldn’t find it. I agree, would be great to have an easy to find link in the home post. Perhaps soggy can ask for it to be a wiki!
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I’ve updated the home post with a link to JFF Theater!
Does anyone happen to know how many months JFF Theater will run? The previous JFF+ was only in the fall, wasn’t it?
If it’s indefinite, maybe it could use a separate thread and then the online film festival that only lasts 2 weeks could have yearly threads. Or we can just keep using this thread until the 2025 online film festival.
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The current bunch run for two months, so perhaps the same. We’ll find out for sure in November.
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Saw The Dancing Okami (aka レディ加賀) last night, the one film I was able to get tickets for, and… it was unsatisfying. Like, nothing gets resolved in the story.
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Yuka, who went to the big city to become a famous tap dancer has discovered she can’t really hack it, and comes rushing back home (to Kaga Onsen, in Ishikawa Prefecture) when she learns her mother has collapsed, to take over as okami of the family ryokan… only to discover mother is perfectly fine. Nevertheless, when both mother and childhood (boyfriend? crush? just a friend-who-is-a-boy? it’s unclear) tell her she won’t hack it as as an okami either, she joins an okami training seminar to prove them wrong.
And then the visiting town-promotion specialist discovers she can tap-dance, decides to use a tap-dancing performance to promote the town, and the seminar straight-up turns into a tap-dancing class with her as the teacher, and the whole okami training aspect just… disappears. And it’s not even about her discovering her true calling as a tap-dancing teacher either, because she turns out to be terrible at teaching, and has to call in her own teacher to teach the class.
After a montage and some shennanigans, they pull off the performance… and the movie just ends there. With the performance. Besides discovering that her mother who she thought never had time for her was actually always watching from the back, Yuka learns nothing. She doesn’t overcome any character flaws, or learn her true calling. All the secondary characters whose motivations were all tied up in becoming proper okami but were instead press-ganged into a tap-dancing troupe go unresolved. We don’t even get to see if the performance had the desired effect of increasing tourism to Kaga Onsen (though, I guess the movie itself serves as that for the real-life Kaga Onsen, so only time will tell if it’s successful).
Don’t get me wrong, the tap-dancing was quite impressive (though I felt that the Yuka’s solo dance at the climax - which included her inexplicably splashing around in a puddle that suddenly appeared onstage - wasn’t her best performance of the movie), I just left feeling… unfulfilled. Though I also left thinking that Kaga Onsen was quite pretty, which might have been the whole point.
Also, the fact that the subtitles invariably rendered レディ加賀 as “dancing okami” completely missed the whole Lady Gaga pun.
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Just finished Her Love Boils Bathwater. Spent most of the last part of the film with tears rolling down my face and blowing unattractively into a hankie but loved it. Thanks for the recommendation
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Hah! I was planning to watch it this afternoon/evening after work.
Oooh that sounds promising Thanks!
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