The UK’s biggest festival of Japanese cinema returns to Sheffield

By Grace Osbourne, Marketing Manager

After more than two decades of presenting the best Japanese cinema, the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 returns to Showroom Cinema with a fantastic line-up of captivating films from Monday 16 February – Thursday 25 March.

Our selection of nine titles from this year’s programme: ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You - The True Self in Japanese Cinema’, delve into big questions about self-identity. Can we ever really know anyone, or ourselves? If so, would the answers bring happiness and freedom, or destruction and chaos?

We open with the “frighteningly effective drama” Teki Cometh (敵), featuring an in-person Q&A with director YOSHIDA Daihachi. After receiving a chilling email, the respectable façade of a retired university professor begins to crumble.

Part of LGBTQ+ History Month, Blue Boy Trial (ブルーボーイ事件) (27 February) revisits a forgotten trial in 1960’s Tokyo, which challenges law, society, and the very right to live as oneself.

On 5 March, Sheffield bookshop Novel hosts a pop-up stall outside The Hotel of My Dream (私にふさわしいホテル). A semi-autobiographical story about the author of the UK best-selling book, ‘Butter’, this charming and comical film explores the brutal reality of becoming a notable novelist.

The festival includes a range of genres, from thoughtful and tender anime The Last Blossom (ホウセンカ) (8 March), to the deeply personal documentary What Should We Have Done? (どうすればよかったのか?) (19 March). Laugh-out-loud comedy Strangers in Kyoto (ぶぶ漬けどうどす) (15 March) reveals lesser-known sides of the city.

We present films from different eras from a 4K restoration 1958 psychological drama Conflagration (炎上) (1 March), which sees an apprentice monk’s yearning for purity become a descent into darkness. To a stylish debut from KATO Takuya sees fashion boutique manager Machiko beginning a secret life to escape her frustrations in Ura Aka: L'Aventure (裏アカ) (12 March). 

Love Doesn't Matter to Me (愛されなくても別に) closes the festival on 26 March on a positive exploration of love and the self with a family drama based on the novel by TAKEDA Ayano. 

The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 runs from 16 February – 26 March at Showroom Cinema. Explore the programme today!