Welcoming its ninth edition, Teens Meet Cinema has become one of the most beloved and hopeful events of the Tokyo International Film Festival. This project, which promotes film education and cultivates young film audiences through workshops, returns to the 38th edition of the festival in an upgraded form. This time, teenagers don’t just learn about the art of filmmaking, about expressing their thoughts through film criticism and discussion.
 
As part of the Youth section, a 4-hour Teens Meet Cinema event took place on November 3 at TIFF, organized by Children Meet Cinema. Both teenagers and adults gathered to attend the world premiere screenings of teens’ films and to participate in a newly established Cine Club to discuss films at the festival.
 
The event started with a screening of When a Film is Born—Making of TIFF 2025: Teens Meet Cinema, a 40-minute documentary on the workshop, where 18 junior-high school students spent eight days during the summer to learn about filmmaking. This year, Oda Kaori, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker (Aragane, Cenote, Underground), served as lead mentor, and established the theme “Encounter with the Unknown,” with the keyword “letter.”
 
“If you hear ‘unknown,’ you probably imagine something far away, not close to you,” said Oda, who attended the event. “When you think about it, do you really know someone besides yourself? That’s the approach I wanted to take.” With this theme, the teenagers engaged in workshop activities that included writing letters, interviewing adults, and making a short film.
 
The first teen film that was screened was Team Red’s The Heart with Me, about the breakdown of friendship, which drives the characters to engage with their own feelings and learn how to deal with them. Visual motifs—such as mirrors, rain, and out-of-focus shots—effectively convey a sense of isolation and longing for connection. According to Sasaki Naofumi, one of the participants of the workshop, “If you have one message that you want to convey to people, then anybody can make a movie. That’s what I learned from this course.”
 
Second, Team Blue presented their Cherished Days. The film is about a sudden dissolution of close friendship, carefully combining scenes of ordinary chit-chatting among friends, with a voiceover that reveals an abrupt end of these precious moments. In the film, communication works as a means of both a revelation of destructive secrets and a possible reconstruction of something that has already been lost. Yamada Ryo, who joined the workshop for the second time, shared his realization that the kind of films people make changes drastically in accordance with the places and friends you work with, since they all have different opinions.
 
Last but not least, Team Yellow concluded the program with What Lays Behind the Glass, in which a shy, lonely girl is tasked to acquire courage to make the first move in order to befriend the girl she likes. With an astonishingly unforgettable long take, Team Yellow demonstrated impressive command of film techniques, especially the presence and absence of sound to express isolation. For Ishizu Mieko, who played the lonely girl, filmmaking was both a pleasure and a struggle. She said, “While making this film, I became too passionate. I was happy that people liked what I shot, but it made me really sad when people didn’t understand what I was saying.”
 
Having watched the three passionate works by the young filmmakers, Veerle Snijders, Manager of the Film Education Network at Eye Filmmuseum, who attended the TIFF symposium on film education on November 1, commented. “I was really amazed by what I saw. I really think this is next-level film education. I’m sure that a lot of these teenagers will go on study film. At least, they will now look at film in completely different ways.”
 
The second part of the event was the report of the newly-launched TIFF Teens Cine Club, in which some of the students who participated in the filmmaking workshop engage in a discussion about a film from the Youth section. Ikematsu Sosuke, a renowned actor (My Sunshine, Frontline), also joined the club to lead the discussion.
 
First, Dohi Etsuko from Children Meet Cinema talked with Ikematsu about how this project came about. “Watching films is the most important aspect of film education,” said Dohi, “I wanted these students, who just shot films, to see and appreciate movies.” Regarding asking Ikematsu to join the club, she explained, “I could feel that he loves movies. His interaction with children in My Sunshine was very natural. I had no prior connection with him, but I just wrote him a long email.”
 
Among the three films in the Youth section, Dohi chose Jing Yi’s The Botanist, a visually astonishing but mysterious film about a Kazakh boy’s coming-of-age. Initially, Ikematsu was uncertain about the choice of this film. “The film is abstract, poetic, and political. I was wondering whether the children could understand it,” said Ikematsu, “When we started discussing it, the discussion just deepened a lot. We talked for three hours, but it was as if we could talk for two more hours.”
 
To encourage the children to share their thoughts, they used mind mapping. “First, I asked what they saw in the film. Was it a person? Was it a place?” noted Ikematsu, “We made sure to listen to the opinions of our friends and express what we thought.” At the end of the discussion, they attached leaves to the mind-mapping board as a culmination of their talk.
 
Fujita Natsumi, a member of Team Red and the Cine Club, said, “It was my first time to dig that deep into one movie. Of course, there’s no answer to the movie, but we actually sought for conclusion. Finding that conclusion was pure joy for me.” Fujita also asked a question in fluent Chinese to the director of The Botanist, who was attending the event, and translated his answer into Japanese by herself. The filmmaker responded that the film was inspired by the memory of the environment around him when he was a child.
 
To conclude, Dohi shared a story about how Ikematsu had opened the workshop. Quoting an iconic line from The Botanist, “Anybody can become a botanist if you love plants,” Ikematsu said, “Anybody can be a film professional if you love films.”
 
“Making film and watching film enriches our life,” said Dohi, “It is important for children to have this kind of experience.”
 
Youth TIFF 2025: Teens Meet Cinema
 
TIFF 2025: Teens Meet Cinema – World Premiere Screening Event + TIFF Teens Cine Club 2025 Presentation
Co-hosted by: Tokyo Metropolitan Government
Produced and operated by: Children Meet Cinema
 
Guests:
【TIFF 2025: Teens Meet Cinema – World Premiere Screening Event】
Participating junior high school students, Oda Kaori (Filmmaker/Lead mentor of TIFF 2025: Teens Meet Cinema)
 
【TIFF Teens Cine Club 2025 Presentation】
Ikematsu Sosuke (Actor), Dohi Etsuko (Representative Director and Producer of Children Meet Cinema ®), Participating junior high school students