Every autumn festival that wants to be taken seriously eventually faces the same question: whose taste does it want stamped on its top prize? Tokyo’s answer this year is Rolf de Heer — not a red-carpet magnet but a four-decade Tasmanian outsider whose films have unsettled Cannes, Venice and Berlin without ever softening for Hollywood. Handing him the international competition jury is a bet that curatorial credibility, not celebrity, is what still separates one fall festival from the next.

As Deadline first reported, de Heer will preside over the International Competition jury at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the panel that awards the Tokyo Grand Prix and its special jury prize. The festival is also giving his own work a berth: The Survival of Kindness, his stark, near-wordless 2022 feature, will screen as part of an Australia Spotlight mounted with the Australian Embassy in Japan under the festival’s World Focus banner.

It is a neat piece of programming symmetry. The Survival of Kindness competed at the 2023 Berlinale, where it took the FIPRESCI critics’ prize — the same honor that first announced de Heer to the world when Bad Boy Bubby detonated at Venice in 1993. Between those poles sits a filmography most stars would envy: Ten Canoes, winner of a Special Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2006, and Charlie’s Country, both of which Australia sent forward as its Oscar submissions.

For a director who has spent his career working out of Tasmania rather than Los Angeles, the appointment reads less as a coronation than as a recognition of persistence. “For any of us attending the Tokyo International Film Festival, it is a privilege,” de Heer said; “for me, as a filmmaker, it is even more so,” citing the chance to watch at least fifteen films and argue about them with peers from around the world. It is the language of a cinephile, not a brand ambassador — which is precisely Tokyo’s point.

The 39th edition runs October 26 to November 4, with the full competition lineup due October 1 and the remaining jurors named closer to the opening. Whoever joins him, the panel’s president has already set the register: a festival that would rather measure itself by the films that resist easy consensus than by the names that fill the room.

The Survival of Kindness opens on a woman left to die in a locked cage in the middle of a desert, dragging herself toward a civilization that has forgotten her. It is not the image a festival picks to sell tickets — which is exactly why Tokyo picked the man who made it.

Tags: festival-deal, jury-president, Rolf de Heer, The Survival of Kindness, Tokyo International Film Festival

Tokyo hands its competition jury to Rolf de Heer, an auteur’s auteur over marquee wattage

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