Nov 10 (Kyodok) - The 33rd Tokyo International Film Festival came to a close Monday, with a screwball romantic comedy by Japanese director Akiko Ohku winning the sole award to be bestowed this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.
"Hold Me Back," which won the Audience Award after having its world premiere at this year's festival, tells the tale of a single 31-year-old woman dependent on an imaginary counsellor in her brain named "A" falling in love with a younger man.
The film, based on a novel by Risa Wataya, winner of Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize, is a humorous exploration of the inner struggles of working women in modern-day Tokyo.
In her acceptance speech during the festival's closing ceremony, Ohku said she felt honored to receive the Audience Award for the second time. Her film adaptation of "Tremble All You Want," another of Wataya's novels, won the Audience Award at the festival in 2017.
Touching on how much the world has changed in the three years since then, she said, "I am so grateful to all the audience members who bought tickets and actually came to see this film despite there still being anxiety about the coronavirus."
