PRESS RELEASE



TAKESHI KITANO TO ATTEND THE 49TH THESSALONIKI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The acclaimed Japanese director and actor Takeshi Kitano will attend the 49th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Kitano will visit Greece for the first time in order to present his new film, Achilles and the Tortoise (Achilles To Kame).

The director will be presented with an Honorary Golden Alexander for his work by Festival Director Despina Mouzaki and will also conduct a Masterclass, thus providing the Festival guests and audiences with a unique opportunity to hear Kitano discussing his films and remarkable career as a director, actor and hit television personality of his native country. The Masterclass is scheduled for the 19th of November.

Achilles and the Tortoise (Japan, 119 min), which premiered in the 2008 Venice Film Festival, is the last part of Kitano’s self-reflective trilogy that includes the films Takeshi’s (2005) and Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007). The trilogy investigates the filmmaker’s own relationship to art, his career and the entertainment industry that made him famous, both in Japan and later in the rest of the world. Achilles and the Tortoise is the story of a boy -later a man- who may or may not be a great painter. With the splendid mise-en-scene and color schemes that are characteristic of his work (and including his own paintings), Kitano looks at his own fortune and plight as an artist, using a straightforward narrative structure and sly humor. It is no wonder that the name Takeshi Kitano refers to the director only, while his actor moniker is Beat Takeshi; Kitano’s “split personality” is at the core of these investigations and very much a concern of his as an artist.