The Mumbai International Film Festival, which begins on October 21, is keen on giving you an education in Japanese cinema this year. We pick the best of the 43-film heavy Celebration of Japanese Cinema package

Minimalist and intensely emotional, Japanese cinema has a history that spans at least 100 years. It has spawned various signature genres and sub genres -- anime, Jidaigeki (samurai films), cult horror films, Kaiju (monster films) and pink films (er, aesthetic soft porn). With the collaboration of the Consulate General of Japan in Mumbai and The Japan Foundation, Tokyo, MAMI has acquired 35 mm prints of 43 films.


u00a0Takashi Miike's Crows zero based on the manga titled Crows

Besides contemporary director Takashi Koizumi, several international film historians/ scholars are expected to attend the festival. A seminar on Japanese cinema is also being organised as part of the celebration, which is shaping into one of the highlights of this year's edition of MAMI.

The selection covers eight decades from the early 1930s up to the present. A variety of genres -- traditional family drama, samurai epic, yakuza thriller -- and styles are represented, ranging from Masaki Kobayashi's three-part magnum opus, The Human Condition (1959-61) to Mikio Naruse's intimately-scaled When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960).

Apart from the works of acknowledged masters like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, more recent films by such iconoclasts as Hirokazu Kore-eda (Nobody Knows, 2004) and Takashi Miike (Crows Zero, 2007) are also scheduled.

Catch the premiere of About Her Brother (2010), an elegantly-crafted melodrama by veteran director Yoji Yamada. Japan's most renowned filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, whose birth centenary falls this year, is represented by two films -- a rarely-screened early work, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and his penultimate war epic Ran (1985).

Other films to watch out for include Seijin Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967), the wildly perverse story of the yakuza's (mafia) rice-sniffing "No. 3 killer", and Shoei Imamura's black comedy Zegen (1987), a satire on Japan's 20th century imperialism.