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Acclaimed film and theatre director Julie Taymor paid tribute to legendary Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa Akira in Tokyo on Tuesday, crediting his influence on her deciding to enter the film industry and contributing to her multi-cultural world view.

“I go back to when I saw my first ‘foreign film’ in Paris, when I was 15 years old. I watched ‘Rashomon’ and that changed my life,” said Taymor. “Kurosawa! He is the reason, his movies are the reason, that I became a film director.”

“Rashomon,” based on a Japanese folk talk, won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion in 1951 and has since emerged as a classic of global cinema.

Taymor, whose credits include the original Broadway production of “The Lion King” and the 1997 film “Frida,” is head of this year’s jury at the Tokyo International Film Festival, which will decide winners in its competition section. Her words came at a jury press conference,...

MetaTheater, a platform that globally distributes live theater performances, will be presenting the live streaming of coming-of-age romantic drama, musical Midnight Sun with a K-pop star-studded cast starting May 3rd.

Midnight Sun had its first run introduced in May of 2021 when the industry of performing arts came to close down all around the world due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Midnight Sun is a coming-of-age romantic drama that tells the growth, friendship, and love story of Haram, a young boy who is blinding like a summer day’s ray of light, and Haena, a girl who shines like a midsummer night’s moonlight. The big cast including SHINee’s Onew, DAY6’s Wonpil, Nu’Est’s Baekho, GOT7’s Yongjae, Lovelyz’s Kei, as well as musical actors Cho Hun, Kang Hyein, and Lee Ajin received a lot of attention, leading to the musical’s success by attracting 80,000 global audiences online and offline,...

Alternative content for cinema screening is getting a K-pop spin, giving it a chance of success in parts of Asia, even as distributors and audiences remain hesitant about movies’ return to theaters.

Hong Kong’s Megaton Entertainment will be holding a series of screenings in early May of the tear-jerking tale “Midnight Sun,” which has been given a new turn as a Korean-language stage musical.

“We gave serious thought to bringing the stage musical here to Hong Kong, but the logistics of trying to move cast and crew across borders in Asia is still too complicated,” Gilky Wan, CEO of Megaton told Variety. “With Covid still a factor we simply can’t know when that would be possible.”

Instead, her company has booked out venues at three cinemas operated by Golden Harvest in Hong Kong, to retransmit a live performance taking place in Korea. Korean company Shin’s Wave is...