The latest installment of the iconic monster franchise, Godzilla Minus Zero, landed at the Tokyo International film festival on Sunday with two sold-out showings. Directed, written and visual-effects supervised by Takashi Yamazaki, the film follows the 1949 aftermath of the first movie, weaving the Shikishima family’s struggle to rebuild with the ominous arrival of King Ghidorah. Audience members arrived in cosplay, clutching Gojira figurines, and erupted into unusually enthusiastic applause when the credits rolled. The response echoed the enthusiasm that carried the predecessor to historic box-office records and an Academy Award for best visual effects.
Godzilla Minus Zero energises the festival programme
As the designated “centerpiece film” of this year’s edition, Godzilla Minus Zero supplied a much-needed surge of excitement during the second half of the festival. The movie’s narrative picks up two years after Godzilla Minus One, showing a war-torn Japan still haunted by the monster’s earlier rampage. The Shikishima family – portrayed by Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minani Hamabe – must decide whether to protect loved ones at the cost of harsh moral compromises when a new threat looms. The duo introduced the screenings, sharing that they felt both “excited” and “a little scared” as anticipation built toward the film’s Japanese release on November 3. Their adopted daughter, child actress Sae Nagatani, joined them onstage, underscoring the film’s central theme of family vulnerability in the face of colossal danger.
Other highlights of TIFF 2026
Beyond the kaiju spectacle, the 39th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival offered a diverse array of world premieres. The competition slate featured Indonesia’s Red Before Dawn by Garin Nugroho, China’s period fantasia Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting from Qiu Jiongjiong, and Japan’s creature-feature The Canary’s Lullaby by Akira Ikeda. International entries such as Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski’s Sister Brother Manhole Cover and Portuguese jail drama Memories of Prison added a global texture. Notably, Lisandro Alonso’s acclaimed sequel Double Freedom returned to Japanese screens after a Cannes debut, while Samuele Rossi’s stark war drama Even If Hell Came and Saito Kisin’s off-beat family piece Kefi demonstrated the festival’s commitment to both genre and art-house storytelling.
Panel shines a light on funding inequities for women filmmakers
In a separate session at the festival’s Tokyo Talk lounge, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat and Serbian filmmaker Jelena Maksimović addressed the systemic lack of financing for women creators. Sadat, who recently opened the Berlin International Film Festival with No Good Men, described how development-stage bias – not festival selection – blocks female projects from ever reaching the screen. Maksimović recounted the collapse of Serbia’s Film Center funding after a change of government, noting that even when the institution functioned, budgets for Serbian cinema were “very small” and skewed toward male directors. Both speakers agreed that accessing major grants often requires conformity that women filmmakers are denied, creating a “bubble” of low-budget, independent work separate from mainstream financing.
The discussion, moderated by film scholar Ikuko Takasaki, linked these regional struggles to a broader cultural pattern Sadat called a “cultural mafia” of entrenched male networks. She explained that her own path to European co-production involved compromising with a system that, while less overtly hostile than Afghanistan’s, still treats gender disparity as a normalised fact. The panel closed on a hopeful note, with Maksimović expressing optimism that recent student-led political victories could eventually reshape funding structures across the Balkans and beyond.
