Japan has no shortage of film schools now, but it didn’t in the 1970s. Until that time, the major film companies operated apprenticeship schemes to train would-be filmmakers, but those schemes came to an end in the 1970s as the industry went into a seemingly unstoppable decline. Young people at that time with filmmaking ambitions had no other option but to train themselves – and so the phenomenon known as “Self-Produced Film” (in Japanese, Jishu Eiga 自主映画) came to prominence. It’s not quite the same thing as “Independent Film” in western countries, since that implies independence from an established studio system. “Self-Produced” films were made in Japan by individuals using nothing but their own time, money and ideas. Some were made purely for the satisfaction of the people who made them; others were made in the hope of reaching wider audiences and earning jobs in the film industry for their casts and crews. By the late 1970s a considerable number of “Self-Produced” films had been made by young directors in Japan, and the Pia Film Festival was founded specifically to support this new area of filmmaking.

Much of this new work came from filmmaking clubs in high schools and universities (in Japanese, Eiga Kenkyukai 映画研究会), where students sometimes even made feature-length sound films on Super-8*. At the start in 1977, Pia Film Festival was the only significant showcase for such work, and it attracted crowds of ambitious and sometimes unorthodox young cinéphiles. In its forty-odd year history, PFF has retained its founding spirit very committedly. Its participating filmmakers and audiences are still those ambitious, unorthodox cinéphiles.

*Here, we use the word Super-8 because this word has more general meaning regarding shooting on film, but Fuji Single-8 was more commonly used in Japan to make Self-Produced films.

Realizing the need to provide even greater support for the new talents it was introducing, PFF launched its “PFF Scholarship” in 1984. This is not a “scholarship” in the western academic sense, but a scheme in which PFF helps a selected director to make her/his debut feature, steering them from the initial planning through to ultimate theatrical release. The “PFF Scholarship” is still awarded annually.

As PFF developed its policies and consolidated its growing scale in the 1980s, other film festivals appeared in Japan – notably, of course, the Tokyo International Film Festival, launched in 1985. The changing cultural environment prompted PFF to define and state its goals in the late 1980s. The festival set itself three targets:

• Discovery – finding outstanding new talents through its competition for the PFF Award.
• Presentation – showcasing the year’s most interesting “self-produced” films in the festival.
• Cultivation – operating the “PFF Scholarship” to nurture a debut feature from planning through production to release.

Since the 1990s, PFF has actively promoted wider screenings of films screened in the festival or made by PFF directors, both at home and abroad. This work begins in international and domestic film festivals, of course, but sometimes extends to theatrical releases.