Tiffcom is back in-person after four years, at a new location and featuring the inaugural Tokyo Story Market
Tiffcom is preparing a landmark 20th anniversary edition. The content market that sits alongside Tokyo International Film Festival will not only celebrate its first in-person event since 2019, it will also move to a new venue and launch the first Tokyo Story Market.
“The overall numbers have not yet closed, but the exhibition space has sold out,” says Tiffcom CEO Yasushi Shiina of the move from Ikebukuro to the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center in Hamamatsucho, closer to the festival than in previous years.
“At the previous physical event about 40% were overseas exhibitors, but this has increased to 48%,” adds Shiina, who has led Japan’s largest film and TV content market since 2013.
The three-day event (October 25-27) will also introduce the Tokyo Story Market, a platform to negotiate film and TV adaptations of original works including Japanese comics (manga) and novels.
“With the rise of global platforms, there is a need for original stories that captivate the world,” says Shiina. “Japan is one of the world’s leading countries for rich stories such as manga and novels, but there was no place in Tokyo to sell them. For this reason, there were strong requests from publishers to launch a market in Tokyo.”
Participants include film producers and Japanese publishing companies Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan.
The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market (TGFM) will return for its fourth edition but is the first to take place in-person. It includes one-on‑one meetings with producers, sales agents, distributors, financiers and broadcasters hunting projects in which to invest. Projects must have 60% of the total budget secured and include an Asia‑related element.
Projects that previously participated in TGFM include Élise Girard’s Sidonie In Japan, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and Indonesian director Edwin’s 2021 Locarno Golden Leopard winner Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash.
A total of 15 projects will be showcased this year, hailing from Japan, South Korea, Canada, India and France, among other territories. This year’s TGFM will focus solely on features, unlike previous editions that included TV series. “Although we have held the event three times in the past, there were very few submissions of TV series, so we decided to focus on the call for feature film projects,” Shiina explains.
Tiffcom will also host a masterclass and pitching contest, organised with Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association and Digital Hollywood University; an examination of the global strategies of Toei Animation; and a case study of the international distribution success of animation feature Suzume.
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