It seems that there is more than one annual film festival in town: TOKYO FILMeX was launched in 2000 as a more independent alternative to the Tokyo International Film Festival. We went to see a symposium on the role of film festivals and their importance for audiences, film makers and the industry. The discussion was moderated by British Film critic Tony Rayns, and the panel consisted of former Rotterdam film festival director Simon Field, Japanese directors Hirokazu Koreeda, Shinya Tsukamoto and Takeshi Kitano, and the Japanese producer Masayuki Mori. As Rayns remarked at the beginning, it was a rather strange setup to have a foreigner lead a discussion with Japanese-speaking Japanese film makers in front of a Japanese audience, and in fact, it turned out to be rather tedious, although the translators did their best.