At the time of writer-director Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival (1985), Dave Kehr in the Reader called him the leading Japanese filmmaker of his generation. Made 20 years later, this recent Yanagimachi featureset at a Tokyo film school, and focusing on the lives of students who are about to shoot a featurehas stimulated a lot of favorable buzz since it showed at the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2005. In Japanese with subtitles. 115 min. (JR)